What’s Going On With Unmarked Graves In Canada?

Challenge To The “Narrative Truth” Of Residential Schools Is Increasing By The Day

A family walks through a field where flags and solar lights mark the site of suspected human remains at the former Marieval Indian Residential School. (Geoff Robins/AFP via Getty Images)

A shorter version of this article appeared as a guest True North op-ed on June 4, 2022.

On May 27, 2022, the one-year anniversary of Chief Rosanne Casimir’s press release announcing that the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, had been found by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) in the apple orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, the New York Post published an article entitled ‘Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics.

On the previous day, Canada’s National Post had published a piece by veteran journalist Terry Glavin, The year of the graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves. 

These two stories are nothing less than a 180-degree course reversal in the sensationalist narrative about unmarked graves and secret burials at former Indian Residential Schools that readers in the West - post George Floyd – had been thoroughly primed to accept.

I say people in the West, not just Canadians, because the shocking “revelations” of murdered children buried in unmarked graves were fallaciously reported internationally by an unquestioning somnambulist media which had become accustomed to spreading ahistorical anti-West propaganda. 

As far back as June 2021, Candice Malcolm was one of the first Canadian journalists who, instead of succumbing to hysterics, did what journalists are supposed to do; ask questions, search for facts and evidence (until the story makes sense). Candice proclaimed in a Toronto Sun column, just one month after the Kamloops discovery,

“We currently have people in the media invoking the holocaust, saying the discovery equates to genocide, and treating these residential schools as if they were all some kind of a death camp. But before we accept the very worst accusations against our country, let’s be sure to first look at all the facts.”

There were a number of pivotal articles which led to this 180-degree reversal of the current media narrative.  One of the first was published in January in the Dorchester Review, In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found. Retired historian Jacques Rouillard questioned the premature rush to judgment after Chief Casimir’s announcement:

The Kamloops “discovery” of 2021 created a major sensation in Canada and abroad. Based on the preliminary assessment and before any remains were found or any credible report made, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately referred to “a dark and shameful chapter” in Canadian history.[3] British Columbia Premier John Horgan said he was “horrified and heartbroken” to learn of a burial site with 215 children that highlights the violence and consequences of the residential school system.[4] Several other Aboriginal communities and media outlets then followed up with references to unmarked graves.

In February, Frances Widdowson made a compelling comparison in the American Conservative between the sensational stories which had attached themselves to the unmarked graves narrative and the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s:

Upon closer examination, the circulation of these stories has some similarities with the moral panic started by the book Michelle Remembers published in 1980. The case involved Michelle Smith, who, after engaging in recovered memory therapy, made sweeping claims about the satanic ritual abuse that she claimed to have endured. The book presented itself as being factual, but scrutiny of its contents did not corroborate its claims. This did not prevent it from instigating a social contagion, leading to a satanic abuse moral panic in the 1980s that resulted in over 12,000 unsubstantiated accusations being made. The hysteria eventually subsided, but not before a number of innocent people had their lives ruined.

In that connection, it’s worth noting that reliance on memories and story-telling were foundational to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s process.

In Re-Evaluating Canada’s (Un)Truth and Reconciliation Commission: How The Public Forum Leads To Entrenchment of Postmodern Myth, I offered a laundry list of positive evidence that countered the current media narrative:

• “We all heard of horrible lies created by some individuals in order to receive as much money as they could.” - Former Dene Chief Cece Hodgson-McCauley

• As Hymie Rubenstein has pointed out, there is “not a single known victim, not a single identified murderer, not a single grieving parent looking for a child who went missing while attending a residential school, and not a single body.”

• In his autobiography, Breaking Trail, Senator Len Marchand, has good things to say about his experience at Kamloops Indian Residential School: “The reader might expect me to tell a few horror stories about physical and sexual abuse at the residential school. But I know of no instances at KIRS. There was the strap for serious transgressions, to be sure, but that was no different from the corporal punishment that was doled out to white students in the better schools of Vancouver and Victoria. I was never abused, and I never heard of anyone else who was mistreated at the Kamloops school. The nuns and priests and brothers had some old fashioned notions about what Indians were and what we needed, notions that today young Indians would find at best quaint, and at worst, offensive. But they meant well by us, and they all did their duty by us as they saw fit.”

• In the 1990s, even in the years after the Chief Fontaine interview, viewpoints like the following were common, and no trigger warning was necessary: “Chief Clarence Jules, a respected three-term chief of the Kamloops band, also attended Kamloops Indian Residential School. In ‘Our Chiefs And Elders’, published in 1992, he complained that he had been strapped for speaking his own language at the school, but thought it was ‘probably the best system we had around at that time.’ He said nothing about murder and mayhem, nothing about secret burials or any of the other fantastic claims now being made.” 

• Ground penetrating radar may have found soil disturbances, but excavations have yet to discover any actual graves or human remains - “The list of former residential schools and Indian hospitals where excavation has yielded nothing and stories of burials have been proved untrue includes the former Mohawk Institute at Brantford, the former Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia, the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, and the Kuper Island Indian Residential School in British Columbia.” 

• Tomson Highway (who attended a residential school for nine years) from an interview in the Huffington Post, published in 2015 shortly after the release of the TRC’s report: "All we hear is the negative stuff, nobody's interested in the positive, the joy in that school. Nine of the happiest years of my life I spent it at that school. I learned your language, for God's sake. Have you learned my language? No, so who's the privileged one and who is underprivileged? You may have heard stories from 7,000 witnesses in the process that were negative, but what you haven't heard are the 7,000 reports that were positive stories. There are many very successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn't have happened without that school.” Later in the same article, Tomson adds: "[But] only we can solve the problem and the only way we can do it is to go to school, get a fantastic education, and just do successful things. We need young native people to grow up believing that they can be brilliant and successful. That's the only way we can fix things: elevate the level of education, elevate the level of literacy, and it will elevate the frequency of success."

Another important inflection point occured in March 2022, when Conrad Black wrote in the National Post about the lack of evidence concerning these alleged secret burials:

The research of the Frontier Centre and (Brian) Giesbrecht has unmasked the dearth of conclusive evidence of the claims of atrocities committed against the infamous 215 Indigenous children who were allegedly killed and secretly buried in Kamloops, B.C. This charge began with the revelation by First Nation of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir that she “knew” of this secret burial because “knowledge keepers” told her about “oral histories” of six-year-old children being taken from their beds at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the dead of night to bury fellow students in the apple orchard. Stories such as these have been circulating for decades, and were amplified by less precise allegations about mysterious unmarked graves near the locations of other residential schools.

There are many more examples of excellent narrative-busting work by many Canadian researchers that have been omitted in this essay.

I will deal with the response to this increase in skepticism more fully in another essay. In brief, in the coming days we will see a battle play out between activist-scholars and traditional scholars in which the former will castigate the latter as “residential school denialists.” But more to the point, we will see a battle over truth. What really happened at residential schools? Why are sensational stories repeated by the media in the absence of concrete evidence? Canadians are beginning to ask these important questions. At the very least, Canadians deserve a discourse that allows all of Canada’s experts to put forward evidence and arguments as to why they feel the narrative truth around Canada’s residential school legacy and the related stories of unmarked graves seem not only at odds with the facts, but a shamefully tangled mass of contradiction and postmodern obfuscation.

From what can be seen so far on Twitter, the woke scholars are losing their minds. I’m sorry to see people so upset, but Canadians need to know the truth.

Thanks for reading! For more from James Pew on the Canadian unmarked graves story, check out - A Narrative Reversal Like No Other - by James Pew (substack.com)