3 Years Later, Canadian ‘Mass Graves’ Claims Remain Unproven

Says the National Catholic Register

The former Kamloops Indian Residential School is reflected in a pool of water in Kamloops, Canada, on Sept. 1, 2021. (photo: Cole Burston / AFP via Getty Images)

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Three years after controversy erupted across Canada and internationally over “mass graves” allegedly located near the residential schools for Indigenous children that once operated in Canada, evidence continues to accumulate that these claims lack any factual foundation.

This comprehensive absence of substantiation was highlighted in an Oct. 14 article by Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady, titled “Canada’s Unproven Mass-Grave Scandal.” The article referenced a bill that was introduced last month in the House of Commons of Canada that would criminalize “condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada through statements communicated other than in private conversation.”

The initial allegation regarding the discovery of unmarked graves was made in May 2021 in Kamloops, British Columbia. Based on the findings of a ground-penetrating radar survey of an orchard located beside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, issued a press release stating the survey had provided “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” who had been students at the school and whose deaths there had been undocumented.

But in late May of this year, Canadian journalist Terry Glavin reported in the National Post that Casimir has now dropped the central element of her claim regarding the ground-penetrating radar survey’s findings. In a press release commemorating the third anniversary of her 2021 statement, Casimir omitted her previous reference to dead children, stating only there had been “confirmation of 215 anomalies.”

Although Casimir did not use the “mass graves” phrasing in her initial press release, numerous Canadian and international media outlets immediately utilized that wording in sensationalist reporting about her announcement, including an article published the following day by The New York Times titled “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.”

In fact, the ground-penetrating radar had merely identified “anomalies” under the surface of the Kamloops site. Such anomalies indicate only that some kind of soil disturbance has occurred, not the definite presence of any human bodies. Despite this uncertainty, until this year the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation declined to acknowledge that the existence of children’s graves was unproven.

Glavin’s National Post article noted that the First Nation’s leadership has been aware of the flaws associated with its ground-radar survey since at least 2022, when they received an independent site analysis of historical activity that took place at the site since the residential school was founded in 1890. And according to a June 2023 article in The Dorchester Review, a Canadian journal that has published a number of articles challenging the prevailing narrative regarding the government-funded residential schools that were operated by the Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, it should have been evident even before they were released that the Kamloops findings were highly questionable. That’s because readily accessible archival records documented that trenches, lined with clay tiles, had been dug at the site as a septic field in 1924, and it’s known that such trenches can’t be distinguished from graves by ground-penetrating radar.

No Proof Elsewhere

In the weeks following the May 2021 statement regarding the Kamloops school’s graves, similar claims were made in connection with other former residential schools in British Columbia and in other Canadian provinces. By July of that year, it was alleged that a total of more than 1,300 unmarked graves had been discovered via ground-penetrating radar surveys.

Because the Catholic Church oversaw the majority of Canada’s government-funded residential schools, which operated from the late 1800s until the last one closed in 1996, these allegations triggered a wave of anti-Catholic violence. In the summer of 2021 more than 60 churches, most of them Catholic, were burned to the ground or vandalized, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for Pope Francis to apologize personally. The controversy impelled the Pope to make a “pilgrimage of reconciliation” to Canada the following year, during which he apologized, without specifically referencing the mass graves claims, for any harm the schools had caused to the nation’s Indigenous peoples.

“An important part of this process will be to conduct a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered,” Francis said at that time.

Yet as in the case of the Kamloops Indian Residential School claim, there has never been any confirmation that the other ground-radar anomalies near other former residential schools were associated with the unmarked graves of “missing” students whose deaths had not been recorded. In British Columbia, where many of the claims have been made, the government-owned Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported in April that “no First Nations in B.C. have yet taken the step of excavating these sites, and the decision about whether to do so is a difficult one that requires planning and consultation with communities and families.”

The only completed excavation to date was conducted in 2023 at Pine Creek, Manitoba, where a ground-radar survey had identified anomalies in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church, located close to the former Pine Creek Residential School. No human remains were found during that excavation.

The Catholic Register, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Toronto, reported that this continuing absence of confirmation had provoked a pointed response from Bishop Emeritus Fred Henry of Calgary. “Why is the Catholic Church not asking the federal government for proof that even one residential child is actually missing in the sense that his (or) her parents didn’t know what happened to their child at the time of the child’s death?” Bishop Henry asked in an email he sent to the newspaper.

Criminalizing ‘Denialism’?

Despite the absence of corroboration, neither the Canadian federal government nor the Canadian media appear inclined to revisit their perspectives on the “mass graves” controversy.

A comprehensive critique of the foundation of the claims regarding the alleged graves, as well as some other criticisms that have been leveled against Canada’s former residential schools, has been articulated in the book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools). Co-authored by C.P. Champion, editor of The Dorchester Review, and Tom Flanagan, a retired University of Calgary political scientist, the book is a collection of heavily footnoted chapters written mainly by academics and lawyers. Among other things, it makes the case that no unmarked or mass graves of missing children have been found to date at residential schools; that it’s a fiction that any Indigenous children ever “went missing” at these institutions; that most students who attended the schools did so voluntarily with the permission of their parents; and that conditions for students at the schools were generally better than they experienced in their home communities during the period the schools were in operation.

While the book has been a Canadian nonfiction best-seller since it was published in December, its arguments received virtually no coverage from Canadian media outlets until a controversy erupted after the wife of the mayor of the British Columbia community of Quesnel distributed some copies of the book. Highlighting the book’s condemnation by local First Nations representatives as “absolute bigotry and hatred,” a CBC account of the controversy suggested Grave Error was a clear example of residential school “denialism.”

The CBC article noted that any questioning of the claims made against residential schools has been publicly condemned as “denialism” by Kimberly Murray, who was appointed as the federal government’s “special interlocutor” in the wake of the 2021 allegations regarding graves.

In the interim report she submitted to the government in June 2023, Murray characterized “denialism” as “the last step in genocide,” and recommended that the federal government make it a criminal offense. David Lametti, who was then serving as Canada’s justice minister, responded to Murray’s recommendation by saying that he was open to applying the same criminal and civil measures as those that are now in force in Canada against those who deny, minimize or condone the Holocaust, the CBC reported.

With Murray’s final report still pending, Trudeau’s Liberal government has not yet taken any action with respect to her recommendation that “denialism” should be criminalized; the bill that The Wall Street Journal commentary referenced was introduced into Parliament in September by a member of another party. But Murray doubled down on her claims in another interim report, titled “Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience,” that she released in July 2024 “as an antidote to denialism.”

“The histories of the cemeteries that were located at former Indian residential school sites are evidence of genocide and mass human rights violations,” the report states.

Church Attacks Continue

Alongside the unabated rhetoric asserting that the unsubstantiated allegations about mass graves should not be open to challenge, arsons and other acts of violence against Christian churches have continued. As of the end of September, the number of churches that have been burned or vandalized had risen to 112, according to one report.

For its part, The New York Times — whose inflammatory May 2021 article was probably the single most significant trigger for the global media frenzy regarding the “mass graves” allegations — recently revisited the issue. This time around, even though the Times reported that three years later “no remains have been exhumed and identified,” it offered no apologies for its initial reporting and suggested that concerns in Canada about the legitimacy of the claims are confined to “a small universe of conservative Catholic and right-wing activists.”

The Times also quoted former Canadian Justice Minister Lametti, who left politics earlier this year. “Will every one of those anomalies turn out to be an unmarked grave? Obviously not,” he said. “But there’s enough preponderant evidence already that is compelling.” However, the article failed to acknowledge that even if Lametti is correct and some anomalies eventually do turn out to be individual graves, those findings would not validate the initial New York Times reporting about a “mass grave” at the site of the former Kamloops residential school.

At the conclusion of her Wall Street Journal commentary, O’Grady criticized the one-sided prevailing narrative about “mass graves,” and efforts to criminalize opinions that challenge this narrative.

“Separating fact from fiction on this issue requires open and honest debate,” O’Grady commented. “Legislative attempts to close down speech by labeling contrary points of view ‘denialism’ won’t lead to reconciliation and won’t restore the well-being of Canada’s Indigenous communities.”

Church Reconciliation Efforts

Canada’s bishops have mostly declined to engage in the debate over the validity of the claims regarding mass graves at residential schools, focusing instead on efforts to foster reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in the context of the harms that resulted from the schools’ operation, including widespread sexual and physical abuse, and from other policies that failed to fully respect their individual and collective dignity and rights.

In 2021, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops established a $30 million (Canadian) Indigenous Reconciliation Fund. It supports healing and reconciliation initiatives for families and communities and efforts to revitalize Indigenous languages and cultures, as well as educational initiatives and dialogues that promote Indigenous spirituality.

The CCCB released a statement on Sept. 30, which was designated in 2021 as Canada’s National Day of Truth and Reconciliation.

“In solemn prayer and reflection, the Executive Committee of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops mourns the painful legacy of the former Indian Residential Schools and reaffirms its commitment to walking with Indigenous Peoples on their healing and reconciliation journey,” it stated. “On the 2024 National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, we are reminded of the Holy Father’s profound hope ‘that Christians and civil society in this land may grow in the ability to accept and respect the identity and the experience of the Indigenous Peoples.’”

(This article was originally published in The Catholic Register on October 18, 2024).

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Thanks for reading. For more on this topic, read Is Kimberly Murray planning to recommend Canadian taxpayers pay billions in reparations?

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