Two hundred million dollars. Dozens of church arsons. No confirmed bodies. That’s Canada’s balance three years after the New York Times dropped a bunk story about a “mass grave” discovered in the apple orchard of the former Kamloops, B.C. residential school. And on Friday, the newspaper continued to push the story.
“Despite possible evidence of hundreds of graves at former schools for Indigenous children, challenges in making a clear conclusion have given rise to skeptics,” reads the headline.
The next 1,500 words feature sympathetic interviews with Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation, whose premature announcement that “remains of 215 children” had been found at the Kamloops site ignited protests across the nation in 2021, and lawyer Kimberly Murray, who the federal government appointed to brainstorm legal changes in the aftermath.
Last year, Murray suggested that Canada make it a crime to downplay the harms of residential schools, an extreme proposal that snuffed out much of the legal activist’s credibility in the mainstream. Of course, no mention of this in the pages of the Times. Murray is quoted, however, stating that evidence for mass graves does exist, and that the government purposely “disappeared” Indigenous children.
At very least, the reporter of Friday’s tale, Ian Austen, tells us off the top that “no remains have been exhumed and identified” three years after 215 blips in ground-penetrating radar readouts were found at the Kamloops site. Casimir delivered that correction in May: instead of the original “children,” she referred to those radar blips as “anomalies” to reflect the fact that they could be anything — stones, roots, hunks of clay and, yes, possibly the bones of students. Austen, who also authored the viral Times story about a “mass grave” near Kamloops in 2021, has adjusted his reporting accordingly. No longer “remains,” he now writes about “possible unmarked graves.”
Instead of interrogating why answers are still far away, he frames the slow-walking of the truth-seeking process as a passive fact.
“Many communities are struggling with a difficult choice: Should the sites be left undisturbed and transformed into memorial grounds, or should exhumations be done to identify any victims and return their remains to their communities?” he asks. Later, he re-hashes Casimir’s vague answer: the decision is “difficult” and “very complex”; “it’ll take time”; “we have many steps to go”; more must be done to confirm whether a particular anomaly is a grave.
Funny how all the urgency evaporated.
Not mentioned in the Times is the mountain of state funding that has been doled out since 2021. Since that year, $216.6 million has been handed out by the federal government to Indigenous communities to “document, locate and commemorate the children that did not return home and unmarked burial sites associated with former residential schools.”
While these grants were once capped at $500,000 per community, the feds apologetically threw that limit out the window — because “Communities know best what is needed to undertake this important work, on their own terms.” And so the work drags out.
There are other consequences for ending the speculation with a dig. What if nothing turns up at all? So far, this has been the case at a residential school site in Manitoba’s Pine Creek, where efforts were made to dig up the radar blips in the church basement. Not one of those anomalies turned out to be a human grave.
Before shovels hit the ground in Pine Creek, CBC News relayed a secondhand quote by First Nations elders referring to “those kids in the basement.” Other CBC coverage vaguely referred to “horror stories” by former students who claimed that children’s bodies were stored and buried downstairs in the winter.
It’s not the end of the road for the site — dozens more anomalies were found elsewhere on the grounds, and they, too, could be excavated — but it did hush up the mumblings of a nefarious basement crypt that had driven an emotional local news cycle.
And that might also be part of why so little progress has been made elsewhere. At Pine Creek, CBC wrote that the lack of grave findings would “feed into a denialist narrative of what happened at residential schools.” At Kamloops, Casimir seems to be aware of the possibility here as well, telling Austen that the “denialists, they’re hurtful. They are basically saying that didn’t happen.”
Most people, though, aren’t arguing that the residential school system didn’t exist, or that Indigenous students were not often subjected to abuse, or that there weren’t significant problems with how the schools were managed. The issue is whether there are any “unmarked graves” — for now, none have been found — and if so, whether they were intended to be secret — which is unlikely, considering how wood crosses biodegrade over time — and finally, whether such graves represent casualties of genocide.
The answer to the latter is “probably not.” Though the residential school system is often thought of as an instrument of cultural genocide, it was a tool for assimilation, not extermination. Most students who died at residential schools succumbed to diseases that medicine at the time could not cure, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission detailed. But this kind of nuance escapes the New York Times, which has yet to report on a single grave in three years, let alone pry apart whether such a discovery would signify horrors on par with the Holocaust.
Great care, however, has gone into discrediting anyone who insists (correctly) that graves have not been found as rube “denialists.” Austen refers to this group as a “small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists” represented by Tom Flanagan, who edited a book on the controversy called Grave Error. Flanagan doesn’t dispute that children died, but he does maintain that no bodies have been recovered, and that a distinction should be made between regular and “clandestine” burials — points that deviate from the supposed consensus, according to the Times: “Flanagan and other skeptics have been roundly denounced by elected officials across the political spectrum who say evidence clearly suggests that there are many sites of unmarked burials.”
But that’s the kind of reporting you can expect on this topic. People are cast as unreasonable genocide deniers simply for asking to see yet-nonexistent evidence behind vast claims of wrongdoing — evidence which could support a finding of genocide if combined with many more pieces of yet-nonexistent evidence. The others, well, they can say what they want.
National Post