“As a community we were preparing for more than one possible outcome, which meant we would prepare for the worst but hope for the best,” Pine Creek Indian Reserve Chief Nepinak said as he awaited the results of a search that began in 2021 for the buried remains of former students at his community’s Indian Residential School..Little did he know that the outcome would be worse than he could ever imagine..Manitoba's Pine Creek Indian Residential School, one of Canada’s longest running boarding schools for treaty aboriginals (1890-1969,) was operated by the Roman Catholic Church on behalf of the Government of Canada..As with many of these schools, homesickness, strict regimentation and an aversion to alien forms of discipline led students to run away or engage in acts of arson. In 1928, a group of eight boys ran away from the school. Two years later, a boy was caught trying to set the school on fire..“Some of the living students have long spoken about the abuse there,” and related “horror stories” about what happened in the basement of the church next door..But the nature of the abuse, its perpetrators and its victims have never been revealed except in the vaguest possible terms..Still, such “horror stories” led the reserve to fund searching for the remains of unnamed allegedly missing students beginning last year, using ground penetrating radar (GPR) — a technique that can only detect soil disturbances rather than human or other organic material..To its credit, and unlike any other Indian Reserve searching for the remains of such students, the RCMP was called in last October to assist with the investigation of the underground GPR anomalies found at the site..On July 21, the RCMP announced:.“The investigation into possible criminality in relation to potential burials at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Roman Catholic Church has moved into a new phase. After a year of interviewing community members, conducting surveys, and following up on leads, the RCMP has not uncovered evidence at this time related to criminal activity specific to the reflections detected at the site..“In consultation with the community and partners, a way forward has been found. A community-led forensic anthropological dig in the basement of the church is taking place. If anything is located that is possibly related to criminal activity, the RCMP has plans in place and investigators assigned to continue the investigation.”.The excavation of the church basement where 14 subsoil GPR anomalies were discovered began July 26 and was “the next step on a journey of trauma and healing,” according to Nepinak..Pine Creek member, Will Charbonneau, who grew up attending an elementary school beside the former Pine Creek residential school for a decade, declared, "All the front classrooms had a view of the church so you would be sitting there every day looking at it going 'there's ghosts in the church.' We saw it and heard about it every day. We grew up around it.'".During a community update the day before the start of excavation, children played and sang drum songs. One community member opined elders told her, "Those kids in the basement need to hear the drum and they need to hear kids playing.".But after searching for nearly four weeks in a culturally sensitive manner, no evidence of human remains was found..Regardless of this failed next step, the community needs to be lauded not only for inviting the RCMP to help, a giant step forward for such searches, but for its decision to use excavation to hunt for the remains of missing Indian Residential School students, a great leap forward for Indian Residential School searches..But the community and its leaders still need to be held accountable for initiating a search with no evidence there was anything to search for because there is no proof of any missing students associated with the boarding school on this reserve (or with any other Canadian Indian Reserve.).Indeed, the reverse is true..After decades of fruitless searches or spurious findings, the first named child being looked for by a named relative of the “15,000 to 25,000 … maybe even more” children, Murray Sinclair, former Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, claims are missing, only two have been found, neither of them ever missing..The first was Thomas Nepinak, and he was 11 years old when he died, as shown by his name at the bottom of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s (NCTR) Memorial Register, a list compiled “to forever remember and honour the children who never returned home from residential schools.”.Thomas was a student at this very same Pine Creek Indian Residential School and has also been identified by both his province of Manitoba death record and https://tnc.news/2022/06/06/guest-op-ed-what-two-missing-children-reveals-about-all-missing-indian-residential-school-students/..The view of one band member in a CBC story claiming she has been searching for a distant missing relative nicely captures the conflation between “missing” and “unmarked graves”:.“His name is Thomas and he was 11…. He never came home from residential school, so everyone is looking forward to hopefully getting his remains so they can do a proper burial for him.”.However, Thomas was never missing. His is the last name on the Pine Creek IRS Memorial Register..At most, he was slowly forgotten over the decades by most of his family after he died, possibly of blunt force trauma following a fight with another student..Since the reserve has always had its own community cemetery, he would have certainly been interred there in a grave whose wooden cross has long since disintegrated. He surely had “a proper burial,” as have thousands of his “missing” peers..His notarized death certificate provides conclusive proof of where he was born and where he died. It gives the date of his death and how old he was when he died..Unmentioned in the CBC story reporting his unknown status is that the “missing children” discovered by the inconclusive technique called GPR all across the country since the end of May 2021 have no names attached to them, so they can hardly be called “missing.”.In particular, how can thousands of nameless children be listed as missing and not have named parents or relatives frantically looking for them except for two, including this one?.Why his descendants relied on archaic spiritual practices and indigenous “knowings” — a sacred fire, drumming, and pronouncements by reserve elders, as described in a CBC story — to determine his fate instead of searching for his death records in the archives, is troubling..Why an allegedly sovereign “First Nation” hired a pricey GPR outfit with public monies to do a crude surface investigation before digging into the archives at little expense to determine the fate of the 21 “missing” children on the Pine Creek NCTR Memorial Register, is even more troubling..Had it done so, it would have found that of these students, an independent researcher has found 15, only one listed as having died at the Pine Creek Indian Residential School..This finding goes to the heart of the uncertainty surrounding both the thousands of missing children listed on the Memorial Register and those claimed to be buried in unmarked graves across Canada..These very different issues have been deliberately or negligently conflated: the hundreds of alleged but unproven burial plots “discovered” in mainly named reserve cemeteries by the error-prone technique called GPR have found not a single missing IRS student..On the other hand, the 4,115 students listed in the Memorial Register nearly all have a name and date of death attached to them. Invariably, these former students are also referred to as “missing.” But they are not missing because they are known to be dead..Their cause of death, place of death, and place of burial is slowly being revealed by impartial researchers..The sole purpose of this conflation must be to imply that many or most named Memorial Register children are lying in the newly discovered GPR soil disturbances and thousands more that are still to be found..As for Pine Creek, with no accountability required and $320 million of federal funds to draw on, Chief Nepinak, foolishly believing bodies would be found, was forced to proclaim “This does not mark the end of our truth-finding project.”.What now needs to be joyfully shouted from the rooftops are both the unique police investigation and the ground-breaking discovery of no human remains under the Pine Creek Catholic church, hopefully marking the beginning of a truth-finding effort rooted in Western science, objectivity, and critical thinking rather than unfounded indigenous horror stories..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba
