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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By Nina Green
Now that a whistleblower from the Kamloops Band (see attachment below) has come forward to tell Canadians that the Kamloops Band made a mistake when it claimed it found 'the remains of 215 children', and that the Band knows it made a mistake, it's clear that Canadians should have known from the start that the Band's claim was false.
Why?
Because in the 1990s, the Kamloops Band built a tourist attraction - its Secwepemc Heritage Park - on top of what it now claims it always knew were the bodies of murdered children. The attached news article (below) announcing the opening of the Heritage Park in August 1993 shows powwow dancers in the Heritage Park in front of the door to the Band's Museum only a few yards away from where the Band now claims it found 'the remains of 215 children'.
The news article credits the Jules family with the construction of the Park - Chief Manny Jules (brother of Diena and Jeanette Jules), their father, Chief Clarence Jules, and cousins Tim Jules and Dr Ron Ignace.
Why would the Jules family build a tourist attraction on top of the bodies of murdered children?
The only possible excuse would be that when they built the Heritage Park, the Jules family didn't know the bodies of murdered children were there.
But that excuse doesn't work, because the Jules family claims they always knew the bodies were there, so clearly, when they built the Heritage Park in the 1990s, by their own admission they knew they were building a tourist attraction on top of murdered children's bodies.
Diena Jules, who runs the Museum in the Heritage Park, and was responsible for bringing Dr Sarah Beaulieu in to do the GPR work on the May long weekend in 2021 is adamant that she always knew there were bodies in the Heritage Park.
She made that very clear in the CBC's Fifth Estate program, The Reckoning: Secrets Unearthed By Tk'emlups te Secwepemc, which aired on 13 January 2022.
At about minute 12:50 in the program, the Fifth Estate's Gillian Findlay interviewed Diena Jules, who affirmed that she had known about the burials 'since I was a little kid' and that she wanted to find the bodies for her own 'comfort':
CBC's Gillian Findlay: For generations the stories were shared in whispers. But last spring the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation made a decision to see if science could confirm what oral tradition told them. . . .
Dr Sarah Beaulieu: We’re looking for a grave shaft for the most part. We can’t see bones. We can’t see bodies. . . .
CBC's Gillian Findlay: Archaeologist [sic] Sarah Beaulieu is an expert [sic] in ground penetrating radar. She and her team [sic] were hired to look for unmarked graves, starting with the apple orchard.
Dr Sarah Beaulieu: A grave shaft is a soil disturbance. When you dig a grave, and then you put the soil back on top of it, that stratigraphy changes from where the burial is. And so I’m looking for that soil disturbance for the most part.
Diena Jules: I’ve always known since I was a little kid that there was children that were buried.
CBC's Gillian Findlay: Diena Jules is the driving force behind the effort. She runs the local Museum at the community’s Heritage Park, land that includes the old orchard.
Diena Jules: To me, these children are real. It’s like, not that they’re my children, but it’s like I’m a caretaker of them.
Ted Gottfriedson: My whole life, it was something you grew up knowing. It’s like you know the sky is blue without really talking about the sky being blue. You just know.
CBC's Gillian Findlay: Ted Gottfriedson oversees the Museum. In 2019 they got some grant money to upgrade the Park.
Ted Gottfriedson: It’s a Park that we’ve established, and it has traditional plants. It has some traditional dwellings, that sort of thing. So we applied for funding to get some maintenance work done there, upgrade it a bit.
CBC's Gillian Findlay: But then came covid. The maintenance was cancelled. And all of a sudden, there was money to spend.
Ted Gottfriedson: So uh, we met, and uh, Diena, she said, We should look for the, look for the kids.
Diena Jules: We don’t have any information confirming where they are. So I said, I want to, for my own, you know, comfort, I guess, is I want to confirm where they are.
CBC's Gillian Findlay: The work started on the May long weekend, Dr Beaulieu looking for what she calls subsurface anomalies.
Once the GPR work was completed, Canadians could reasonably have expected that Dr Beaulieu would have prepared a detailed written report, and that in view of her earth-shattering conclusion that she had found 'the remains of 215 children', her work would have been peer-reviewed by experienced GPR professionals and archaeologists. Instead, Ted Gottfriedson confirmed at an event on 23 May 2022 (see attachment below) that Dr Beaulieu merely gathered three Band members in the Heritage Park and announced her 'findings' to them verbally. According to Gottfriedson:
Dr Beaulieu performed her work on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And by Monday myself, Kukpi Rosanne [Casimir], uh Tkwenem7íple7 Jeanette [Jules], we went down to the Sacred Site to see what Dr Beaulieu had found.
On the basis of nothing more than a few words from Dr Beaulieu, the Kamloops Band rushed to the media with a false claim which shocked the world and irreparably damaged Canada's reputation at home and abroad.
Now a whistleblower from the Band has come forward to confirm that the Band knows it made a mistake.
But it's also clear the Band knew it was making a mistake from the very outset.
Why?
Because, as noted above, if anyone in the Kamloops Band had really believed there were murdered children buried in the old apple orchard, the Band would never have built a tourist attraction - its Heritage Park - on top of their graves in the 1990s.
No Indian Band would build a tourist attraction on top of the graves of murdered children.
That's just an obvious fact.
So the truth - and the only logical conclusion - is that the Jules family and the Kamloops Band never really believed children were buried in the area where it built its Heritage Park. But once Dr Beaulieu mistakenly told them she had found 215 graves, the Band recklessly rushed Dr Beaulieu's erroneous findings to the world media, and locked down the site so that no one could ask the obvious question: Why did you build a Heritage Park - a tourist attraction - on top of what you claim you always knew were the graves of murdered children?
It's time for the Kamloops Band to officially and publicly retract the false claim which has so badly damaged Canada's reputation around the world, and caused Pope Francis and the Canadian Parliament to foolishly claim that a genocide occurred in Canada.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Kamloops Band whistleblower says Band made a mistake about finding 'the remains of 215 children', and Band knows it made a mistake
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Good point. Let's see if they can squirm out of that.
Where are the bodies?