Why did Canadians believe the Kamloops Band's false claim after Dr Sarah Beaulieu admitted an error which invalidated her work completely?
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By Nina Green
The Kamloops Band made its false claim to have discovered 'the remains of 215 children' via a media release on 27 May 2021:
This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The Band kept the identity of the GPR specialist hidden for a month and a half, presumably so the media could not interview her.
It was not until the Band's two-hour media event on 15 July 2021 that Canadians finally learned the identity of the GPR specialist — Dr Sarah Beaulieu — a conflict anthropologist with no known formal GPR training or certification.
The presentation of Dr Beaulieu's findings (see attached transcript below) took up only 15 minutes of the two-hour event, and astonishingly, during her presentation Dr Beaulieu made an admission which invalidated her GPR work completely.
What Dr Beaulieu admitted was that 15 of what the Kamloops Band had told the world were 'the remains of 215 children' were not the remains of children at all. She admitted that after the world had been told she had found 'the remains of 215 children', someone provided her with reports of archaeological impact assessments and construction work in part of the approximately 2 acres she had surveyed with her GPR machine in the Kamloops Band's Heritage Park. This earlier archaeological and construction work in the Heritage Park overlapped with the area in which she claimed to have found 'the remains of 215 children' and thus 15 of the so-called 'remains' were clearly not remains at all, and had to be eliminated, leaving her with only 200 so-called 'remains'.
Here's Dr Beaulieu's admission in her 15 July 2021 presentation:
From my preliminary findings in May to today’s results, reports providing additional information related to disturbances from archaeological impact assessments as well as construction in parts of this area were subsequently provided to me. These reports were reviewed in order to determine which of these locations overlapped with the GPR survey areas. After this review it was determined that there remain 200 targets of interest in these preliminary results.
The fact that these reports were brought to Dr Beaulieu's attention (by the Kamloops Band? by the Department of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University?) after she had completed her GPR survey establishes that Dr Beaulieu had skipped a vital step. She had not done the necessary archival research prior to doing the GPR work to determine what was already historically known about soil disturbances in the area she intended to survey. GPR is a tool for evaluating the nature of invisible sub-surface soil disturbances, and a GPR operator needs to be aware of what is already historically known about prior soil disturbances in order to minimize the chances of an erroneous interpretation of the GPR results. Dr Beaulieu's failure to do the necessary archival research prior to doing the GPR survey was thus a fatal error.
During her presentation Dr Beaulieu offered Canadians no further explanation concerning this enormous error which completely invalidated her GPR work, and in fact casually brushed it off. At the end of the two-hour media event, a few reporters were allowed to ask questions. Jill Macyshon of CTV National News specifically asked Dr Beaulieu for clarification of her initial claim that there were 215 children's graves and her current claim that there were now only 200:
We had initially in the beginning phases heard of 215 potential unmarked graves. We just want clarification. Uh, 200 anomalies now. Is it more of a, are we understanding now more of the actual grave site as opposed to what we first saw in uh late May?
Incredibly, Dr Beaulieu responded by saying that nothing had changed:
No, nothing’s changed. With ground penetrating radar we can never say definitively that they are human remains until you excavate, which is why we need to pull back a little bit and say that they are probable burials, they are targets of interest for sure. They, they have signatures, multiple signatures that present like burials, um but because of that we do need to say that they are probable until one excavates.
Dr Beaulieu had just vaporized the remains of 15 of the 215 children the world had been agonizing over, and had just admitted to a colossal error in saying earlier that she had found the remains of those 15 children, and she brushed it off with, 'Nothing's changed'.
In fact, everything had changed. Dr Beaulieu had just admitted that she couldn't tell the difference between the graves of 15 children and other earlier soil disturbances at the site until someone provided her with reports that forced her to take those earlier soil disturbances into consideration. Obviously that called into question her entire GPR survey. If she'd been forced to eliminate 15 graves because she hadn't been able to distinguish them from other types of earlier soil disturbances, then what reliance could be placed on her claim that the other 200 were actually graves? None. Since all her results are based on the same methodology and the same interpretation of what she saw on her GPR screen, her claims about the other 200 graves are as valueless as her claim about the 15 graves she had been forced to eliminate
Who should have advised Dr Beaulieu about the earlier soil disturbances before she did her GPR survey?
Obviously the primary responsibility for her failure to do the necessary archival research rests with Dr Beaulieu herself. She clearly omitted a vital step in not finding out about historical soil disturbances before doing her GPR survey, which led her into an error which invalidated her work entirely.
But did the Kamloops Band also have a responsibility to let Dr Beaulieu know about those earlier soil disturbances?
Despite having the resources to do so, it appears the Kamloops Band failed to provide Dr Beaulieu with the information which would have prevented this colossal error. In a presentation on 23 May 2022 (copy attached below) at which both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Governor General Mary Simon were in attendance, Ted Gottfriedson, who along with Diena Jules was responsible for having Dr Beaulieu do the GPR survey, said that the Kamloops Band had an archivist on staff, and that she did archival research in advance of the GPR survey:
We had to do some archival research. That was conducted by our former archivist, Erin Brown, who has moved on.
Ted Gottfriedson also stated that the Kamloops Band had an archaeologist (Leslie Lebourdais) on staff. According to Ted Gottfriedson, it was Leslie Lebourdais who put the Kamloops Band in touch with Dr Eldon Yellowhorn of Simon Fraser University, who recommended Dr Beaulieu for the GPR work:
And so what we did was we met with the, an archeologist that Tk'emlups has on staff. That would be Leslie LeBourdais. And uh she, she actually connected us with Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn, who was a part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He led us to Dr Sarah Beaulieu. And um from there we, we did the work that was necessary.
According to her CV (copy attached below), Leslie Lebourdais was actually a participant in one of the earlier archaeological digs in the Heritage Park in 2002, so Leslie Lebourdais was certainly in a position to have told Dr Beaulieu about it prior to Dr Beaulieu doing her GPR survey. And in fact, the CBC's Fifth Estate program on Kamloops, which aired on 13 January 2022, stated that Dr Beaulieu had a 'team', and showed staged footage which suggests that Leslie Lebourdais may actually have worked with Dr Beaulieu on the GPR survey in the Heritage Park on the May long weekend in 2021 (copy of transcript and photo from the Fifth Estate attached).
A whistleblower has recently come forward to say the Kamloops Band made a mistake, and knows it made a mistake. There are no 'remains' or graves in the Band's Heritage Park. So the question naturally arises: What did Dr Beaulieu actually find in her GPR survey? It wasn't 'the remains of 215 children'. It wasn't graves. What was it?
What Dr Beaulieu actually found was the remains of a century old septic field installed to dispose of sewage from the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
It turns out Dr Beaulieu's remaining 'graves' were actually GPR signals from another type of historic soil disturbance at the site - 2000 linear feet of septic field trenches running in an east-west direction dug, lined with clay tiles, and filled in in 1924 to dispose of the school's sewage. (See attachment below).
Surely a month and a half after the Kamloops Band's announcement on 27 May 2021 had rocked the world, someone in the Kamloops Band would have told Dr Beaulieu about the 2000 lineal feet of septic field trenches which had been laid in 1924 in the area in which Dr Beaulieu did her GPR survey? Surely the Kamloops Band did not keep Dr Beaulieu in the dark about that?
If the Band did tell her about the old septic field, Dr Beaulieu didn't mention it in her 15 July 2021 presentation, despite the fact that it's obvious that the GPR results for a grave and a septic field trench would be similar. Consider Dr Beaulieu's description of a grave in her presentation:
The common features of a formal burial in a cemetery setting typically include a convex reflective pattern at the upper surface of the grave shaft, vertical refractive patterns at the sides of the grave shaft, a horizontal reflective pattern at the base of the grave, and also a range of possible reflective patterns for the contents of the grave. These features are not exclusive to burials.
'A convex reflective pattern at the upper surface', 'vertical refractive patterns at the sides' and 'a horizontal reflective pattern at the base'. Obviously that description applies just as accurately to a filled-in trench as it does to a grave.
It's clear that Dr Beaulieu found no graves. Embarrassingly, she found the remains of a century-old system of septic trenches dug in 1924, lined with clay tiles, and then filled in.
Obviously the Kamloops Band can have no objection to putting a shovel in the ground and digging into old septic field trenches.
And at the same time, the Kamloops Band needs to admit publicly that Dr Hugo Cardoso, Chairman of the Archaeology Department at Simon Fraser University, has stated that the alleged juvenile tooth mentioned in the Kamloops Band's media release on 27 May 2021 and in Dr Beaulieu's presentation on 15 July 2021 is non-human, and that the alleged juvenile rib bone mentioned in both the 27 May 2021 media release and Dr Beaulieu's 15 July 2021 presentation has vanished without a trace after having been turned in to the Kamloops Band's museum 20 or so years ago. The Kamloops Band's claim is simply error compounded upon error.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Why did the Kamloops Band build its Heritage Park on top of what it claims it always knew were the bodies of murdered children?
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I'm researching the Musqueam band on the lower mainland and their website has a blurb about using this technology to find unmarked graves. Who exactly is behind this story with the power to continue to push it as truth without a shred of physical evidence? It's enormously damaging to both indigenous people and all other Canadians. Who is benefiting? Amazing that not one politician has stepped up to open a full, public investigation. Or not, clearly they are all compromised.
Terrible how much incompetence, and worse, dishonesty and grifting goes on in this matter.
Thanks for this revealing exposé.