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TOP STORY
Just as the federal government suspends funding to a body designed to exhume residential school burials, a B.C. politician is being pilloried for saying that the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School contains “zero” confirmed children’s graves.
“The number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero,” wrote B.C. Conservative MLA Dallas Brodie in a Saturday post to X.
The comment was made in support of B.C. lawyer James Heller, who is suing the Law Society of British Columbia for libel over the issue of materials it published claiming that the Kamloops Indian Residential School contains “an unmarked burial site containing the bodies of 215 children.”
When Heller petitioned the society to alter the statement with words such as “potential” or “suspected,” his suit alleges that the society instead circulated a statement accusing him of “denialism.”
“No one should be afraid of the truth … can we trust our legal system if lawyers are no longer free to insist upon the facts?” wrote Brodie in her post, which was swiftly hit with similar charges of denialism.
B.C. Indigenous Relations Minister Christine Boyle slammed Brodie’s post by saying there is “no place in B.C. for residential school denialism.” “This type of ‘truth-seeking’ rhetoric is nothing more than a smokescreen for anti-Indigenous racism,” said Stewart Phillip, grand chief of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, in a Monday statement.
But on the specific issue of confirmed graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School, Brodie and Heller are correct. Although many children died at the school, no children’s graves have been exhumed or confirmed on the former site. This includes the 215 suspected graves turned up in a May 2021 ground-penetrating radar scan commissioned by Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc, the First Nation whose land contains the former school.
Announced as the confirmed “remains of 215 children,” the story received immediate global headlines, prompted a nationwide outpouring of mourning, sparked a wave of several hundred church arsons and contributed to a 2022 Canadian visit by Pope Francis, where he apologized for the Catholic role in administering Canadian residential schools.
Nearly four years later, none of the graves have been archeologically confirmed and the First Nation is now officially referring to the 215 as radar “anomalies.”
Last month, a report by the investigative outlet Blacklock’s Reporter cited documents obtained through an Access to Information Act request that say that up to $12.1 million in federal funds allocated for fieldwork at the Kamloops site appear to have been spent elsewhere.
The report cited an internal department of Crown-Indigenous relations memo saying that no burials had been confirmed despite “requests from families to return bodies.”
Just last week, the federal government discontinued funding to the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials — a body founded in the wake of the Kamloops announcement.
At the time of its launch, the committee was touted as a way to provide First Nations with expertise “to identify, locate, and commemorate their missing children.”
On Monday, B.C. Conservative Leader John Rustad asked Brodie to take down her “zero” post because it could be “misinterpreted” to refer to “the whole issue” of residential schools. The Canadian Indian Residential School system was marked throughout its history by disproportionately high rates of student mortality, many of whom were buried in onsite graveyards.
“Just about every residential school in the country has a cemetery, has children who passed at a residential school who have been buried there, so that’s just the facts,” Rustad said Monday.
At least 51 Indigenous children are confirmed to have died while attending Kamloops Indian Residential School. The figure was obtained via school and federal records tracked down by investigators with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Many residential schools operated in remote areas, and it was not at all unusual for deceased residential school students to be buried in onsite graveyards — many of which then became disused and forgotten after the school’s closure.
“Well over 3,000 children died while at residential school. It is likely that the majority are buried in school or school-related cemeteries,” reads Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, the fourth volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission final report, published in 2015.
One of the most notable examples is Battleford Industrial School in Saskatchewan. In 1974, a team of archaeology students from the University of Saskatchewan exhumed 72 unmarked graves from the school’s former grounds, all of which predated the school’s closure in 1914.
It was a slightly different story at Saskatchewan’s Marieval Indian Residential School, the place where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was photographed placing a teddy bear on an unmarked grave in July 2021.
Trudeau has kneeled atop one of 751 suspected unmarked graves found within a community cemetery located near the former school — some of which could have contained the bodies of students who had died at Marieval. The graves had originally been marked with headstones and crosses, which were all removed in the 1960s.
Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme was explicit in saying that the unmarked graves were not necessarily linked to Marieval. “This is a Roman Catholic grave site. It’s not a residential school grave site … other Roman Catholic faith-goers, Indigenous and not, adults as well, have been buried there,” he told CBC in July, 2021.
At the time the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was active between 2009 and 2015, Kamloops was not cited as a school with known onsite graves. The site is located across the river from downtown Kamloops, and was close to existing burial grounds historically used by First Nations.
When the results of the site’s ground-penetrating radar survey were announced in 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc had characterized the 215 anomalies as “undocumented deaths.”
IN OTHER NEWS
The Liberal leadership candidates had their French-language debate last night. It was two hours long. The ratings were okay (the various YouTube livestreams got about 200,000 views). And the French was extremely not good. Here are some of the highlights …
- None of the four candidates on stage were native French speakers, but Francophones could still have been surprised at the halting French of the three front-runners, Chrystia Freeland, Mark Carney and Karina Gould. Former NDP Leader Tom Mulcair gave this review: “Monday night’s French Liberal leaders debate produced little news beyond the obvious lack of fluent French by both Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland.” CBC’s Rosemary Barton said Carney’s French wasn’t “career-ending” but that he did seem to “struggle to understand” questions.
- Dark horse candidate Frank Baylis was a notable exception in the French department. Although nobody would mistake him as having come from a Francophone household, he did grow up in Montreal and is effectively fluent.
- During a discussion about Palestinian statehood, Carney said “we all agree with Hamas” – prompting both Gould and Freeland to quickly correct him. What he said was “nous sommes d’accord avec Hamas” when the correct line would have been “nous sommes d’accord contre Hamas” (we are all in agreement against Hamas).
- Nobody disagreed on anything, and were all generally in accord that the last 10 years have gone great. The National Post’s Christopher Nardi watched the whole thing, and he found just two instances of one of the candidates criticizing one of the other candidates. Both belonged to Gould; she said Carney should spend more on the military, and when the former Bank of Canada governor promised to make government more efficient using artificial intelligence, Gould told him that if he’d been in government like her he would know “we already use artificial intelligence.”
Atlantic Canada is losing another premier. Just one week after P.E.I.’s Dennis King announced that he’s leaving politics, Newfoundland and Labrador’s Andrew Furey also said he’s calling it quits. Furey’s only been at this for four and a half years, but he said in his resignation speech that he doesn’t want to deal with Trump anymore, calling the U.S. president “erratic, crazy, bonkers.” Furey was among a recent delegation of premiers to the White House, and seemed the most horrified by the whole affair, calling it “chilling” that Trump’s staffers seemed to be treating seriously their boss’s plans to annex Canada.
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