NY Times Returns to the Story About Unmarked Graves in Canada

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Back in 2021 the NY Times published a story shocking story under the headline “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.”

For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.

Now an Indigenous community in British Columbia says it has found evidence of what happened to some of its missing children: a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children on the grounds of a former residential school.

Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation said on Friday that ground-penetrating radar had discovered the remains near the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which operated from 1890 until the late 1970s.

“It’s a harsh reality and it’s our truth, it’s our history,” Chief Casimir said at a news conference. “And it’s something that we’ve always had to fight to prove. To me, it’s always been a horrible, horrible history.”

This became an international story and Justin Trudeau ordered flags flown at half mast for six months. But as I described here in May, no solid evidence to support these claims has ever been produced. To but it bluntly, no remains have been exhumed, not at Kamloops Indian Residential School or other schools that made similar claims. A pair of academic skeptics suggested the whole story of the unmarked graves was a social panic.

It’s now been almost three years since the story first broke. During that time, no formerly unknown graves have been found at any of the locations identified by GPR scans, Kamloops included. Most of these “soil anomalies” have not even been excavated, and so what, if anything, lies beneath the surface remains unknown. In the few cases where excavations have taken place, no burials related to Residential Schools have been found.

Most recently, the Minegoziibe Anishinabe First Nation in Manitoba undertook a four-week excavation of the basement of a church built on the site of the Pine Creek Residential School. Notwithstanding local lore about secret burials that had taken place, the Chief announced that careful work by archaeologists from Brandon University had turned up no remains…

It’s hard to see this movement as anything except a sort of collectively experienced bout of national political madness—one that, almost three years later, Canadian public figures still have failed to directly reckon with, presumably because doing so would require them to admit their own complicity in amplifying the original hysteria.

Today the NY Times has returned to the story with a new story that acknowledges the passage of time and the conspicuous lack of evidence.

The revelation convulsed all of Canada…

Three years later, though, no remains have been exhumed and identified.

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?

While there is a broad consensus in Canada that children were taken from their families and died in these schools, as the discussions and searches have dragged on, a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists have become increasingly vocal in questioning the existence of unmarked graves.

Well, yes, people do tend to become skeptical after people make grand claims that “convulsed” an entire nation and never produced any tangible evidence. The Times seems pretty quick to dismiss the skeptics.

“There’s, so far, no evidence of any remains of children buried around residential schools,” Tom Flanagan, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and an author of “Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools),” said in an interview…

The arguments by Mr. 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.

Three years on, Chief Rosanne Casimir (it’s an elected position) is said to be moving slowly to decide what to do next. “We’ve had many conversations about whether to exhume or not to exhume,” she said. But she added, “We have to know for sure,” she added, “that we did everything that we can to determine: yes or no, anomaly or grave?”

That’s really all there is to it. You’ve made this a big international story and now people want to know if it’s true or not. Nothing else will do.

The commenters seem to get it. In fact, I’m surprised how much more reasonable the comments sound than the article itself. Here’s the top comment.

So having read this article, I’ve learned that native children were in the past treated horribly by the government, and that today there is a vigorous debate about how to remember that. But the article doesn’t tell us whether there is actual evidence for mass graves.

Indeed, the issue here is evidence. A reader in Toronto expands on this.

The ground penetrating radar results showed disturbances that could be bodies, or tree roots, or something else. There’s simply no way to tell unless there are excavations.

When these results were announced in 2021, the country was led to believe these were likely children’s graves. Flags were lowered for months. It was reported as a deeply shameful fact, and it really undermined people’s pride in their country.

Shockingly, no one in authority has tried to actually get to the bottom of what actually lies underground. If these were clandestine graves there should be criminal investigations. If these are tree roots, then this should be a very cautionary tale against preliminary investigation results being taken as fact and then used for political purposes.

All of the above is totally separate from the real and well documented suffering of Indigenous children wrongly taken from their parents and placed in those awful schools. But it does their memory no credit to make unproven claims in their name.

I could go on, so I will.

The media has been reporting for years that “remains” of children and “mass graves” have been found. This is absolutely false. The ground-penetrating radar images show soil disturbances that could be any number of things. The people doing the surveys say this explicitly. There has been one excavation of a site of these images and it found nothing.

“The 14 anomalies detected by ground-penetrating radar, or GPR, yielded animal bones and debris from a fire, but not human remains, [Chief Derek] Nepinak explained.”

The Canadian government and the media have gone all-in on reporting the presence of the remains of dead children. Terry Glavin of the National Post has done excellent reporting on this story.

One more from a commenter who notes something not mentioned at all by the NY Times.