On May 27, 2021, British Columbia's Kamloops Indian Reserve, locally known as Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, issued the following media statement of seismic implications:

“This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar [GPR] 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.

“ ‘We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,’ stated Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir. 'Some were as young as three years old.' ”

Three years later, the remains of these “missing children” buried individually or in a “mass grave,” as many allege, have received no “confirmation” because GPR cannot detect organic material, human or otherwise. Despite making explosive claims about "missing children" and "undocumented deaths," Chief Casimir was still careful to add that, "At this time, we have more questions than answers."

Such a note of caution didn't stop the media, politicians and nearly everyone else from acting as if they had more answers than questions.

The Kamloops discovery became Canada's George Floyd moment. There were angry vigils and public displays of grief and shame almost instantly. Flags on government buildings were lowered to half-mast for nearly six months. Statues of former Canadian heroes were defaced, destroyed, or removed, alongside growing demands to rename streets and public schools. At least 85 Catholic Churches were set ablaze or vandalized both on and off indigenous reserves.

Some of this outrage may have been provoked by Chief Casimir herself. After first denying the widespread media account that there was evidence of a “mass grave,” a sign of possible criminal activity, she reversed course at a September 2021 meeting of the BC Assembly of First Nations in a resolution stating that “215 unmarked mass graves of children were located utilizing ground-penetrating radar” at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

The furor over and false allegations about the “discovery” of buried students has not subsided. Indeed, there are now even more questions than answers about the Kamloops announcement and its many inconclusive copycat successors, at least among those leading the effort to appease indigenous lobbyists.

The Canadian Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations (CIR) confirmed last week it spent nearly $8 million to fund a study of these 215 allegedly unmarked graves, part of the $320 million in new money the federal government committed in August 2021 for programmes to help indigenous communities search burial sites at former residential schools and to support survivors and their communities emotionally.

Apart from the unconvincing 2021 ground-penetrating radar “disturbed soil” findings and alleged consultation with the families of deceased students who attended the school, no other work seems to have been done at Kamloops, including attempts to identify human remains at the site, perhaps using a minimally invasive technique like core sampling.

Nor has there been any public accounting of what became of the $7.9 million by either the Canadian government or the leadership of the reserve, according to Blacklock's Reporter.

Carolane Gratton, a spokesperson for CIR, said, "Details of initiatives taken by Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation are best directed to the community," an understandable reply given the government's decision to give complete control over the presumed unmarked graves to the reserve's leadership from the very beginning.

Far less understandable was the government's unprecedented decision to do so despite the repeatedly expressed views of community members and their supporters that the supposedly unmarked graves at Kamloops and elsewhere in the country contain the remains of murder victims, part of a more significant indigenous genocide, making this whole sordid issue a matter that the police and other impartial forensic experts should have tightly controlled.

Casimir has claimed the RCMP and B.C. Coroners Service were contacted shortly after the May 2021 discovery, but she did not elaborate on contacts with the police. The RCMP's E Division said in a May 2022 statement it is not currently looking into the site: “While we did open an investigative file, we are not actively investigating,” Staff Sgt. Janelle Shoihet said in a statement.

Why was there hands-off law enforcement to a story about alleged criminality reported around the world?

Perhaps, Murray Sinclair, former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the residential schools, and arguably the most influential indigenous leader in Canada, used his position to abort an RCMP investigation, an interpretation based on his indignant remarks before a Parliamentary committee on June 3, 2021.

As an investigation by Rebel News indirectly suggests, it is more likely the RCMP looked through its own files as soon as it was contacted by Chief Casimir, the results of which revealed only groundless accusations of missing and murdered children by so-called knowledge keepers and outside conspiracy theorists like defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett, exposed repeatedly for his outrageous claims. This assertion is reinforced by the facts: there are no named missing children, no frantic parents or other relatives looking for lost youngsters who never came home from their residential schools, and no boarding school murders involving staff, solved or unsolved, during the relevant period, 1890-1969, the Kamloops boarding school operated as a government-funded, closely supervised institution.

Undoubtedly, the federal government was aware of these police and political issues but seems to have chosen virtue signalling, political expediency, or diversion from the many differential adversities and pathologies facing indigenous people (poverty, unemployment, crime, drug and alcohol addiction, etc.) over sound public policy in dealing with the Kamloops findings.

Nevertheless, unfunded but meticulous historical research by dozens of objective scholars and other writers whose results have been published in two edited volumes and several hundred essays found here, here, here, here, and here reveals the Kamloops scandal and others like it as the largest hoax in Canadian history, earning them the label of "residential school denialists" for setting the record straight about Canada's generally altruistic treatment of its indigenous people.

Among the findings of this scholarly research are:

At most, one-third of indigenous children attended residential schools, often laxly, for an average of 4.5 years. This suggests not enough students attended long enough to have been as negatively affected as is claimed;
It was orphans, neglected, or abused children who were forced to attend residential schools; as for the rest, federal policies were rarely enforced;
No "missing children" went away to residential schools and were never heard from again. Instead, their attendance was carefully recorded from registration to completion;
No missing children are buried in unmarked graves underneath or around mission churches and schools;
The suggestion that missing children were murdered by school personnel after being subjected to physical and sexual abuse or even outright torture is a scandalous and totally undocumented blood libel;
No human remains have been located using ground-penetrating radar except for persons properly registered and buried in known school, church, or community cemeteries;
Attendance at residential schools did not by itself traumatize indigenous people, creating social ills that descended across generations;
Conversely, many children entered residential school already traumatized by orphanhood, neglect, or abuse on their home reserves;
Residential schools generally either helped preserve or had little effect on pre-existing indigenous languages and culture; and
Residential school attendance had no resemblance whatsoever to genocide.

None of these findings have had much effect on public opinion, testimony to the power of Big Lies, falsehoods so extreme that it would be hard for people to believe someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

A February 2024 Macdonald-Laurier Institute research report found that “by a 79 to 21 ratio, respondents believed that ‘215 Indigenous residential school children were buried in a mass grave on school grounds in Kamloops, BC,’” a story lacking factual or historical evidence “but which most media and virtually all politicians have been reluctant to contradict.”

The latest indigenous leader to toss out the genocide canard is Dene National Chief Gerald Antoine, who claimed in late March "residential schools amounted to genocide and a crime."

"The truth is being revealed," Antoine said. "There are many people who are missing," though he could not name a single missing child.

Such assertions have been contradicted even by Kimberly Murray, the federal government's special interlocutor on the missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites. On March 21, 2023, Murray confirmed the absence of missing children in her testimony before the federal government Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples when she said:

"The family doesn't know where their loved one is buried. They were taken to a sanatorium, an Indian residential school. They were just told that they died. I can get the name of that individual, [of so-called missing children], I can log into the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, find the name of the student, find a record, which will lead me down to another record, which will lead me to Ancestry.com. Why are families having to go to my office to find the death certificate of their loved one on ancestry.com when the provinces and territories won't just provide those records?

"And then those records will lead you to where they're buried, hundreds of miles away from their home community. We are now seeing families going to cemeteries. I get this a lot. The children aren't missing; they're buried in the cemeteries. They're missing because the families were never told where they're buried. Every Indigenous family needs to know where their child is buried. When we find that and we know that they're going to have a little bit closure now, they know the truth and they have some answers, that's what keeps us going."

Though there is no evidence that thousands of children's deaths were unreported to their parents — and lots of evidence that this is not true, including the refusal of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to remove children whose cause of death and place of burial have been found from its Memorial Register, a list now totalling over 4,100 named and unnamed "children who never returned home from residential schools" — Murray's statement contradicts the established indigenous narrative about missing children.

As long as blood-libel hoaxes like the one at Kamloops are permitted to fester, reconciliation with indigenous people based on truth telling and mutual respect will remain an empty dream. But a nightmare of grossly distorted recrimination, the strategy employed by Canada's huge and growing Indian Industry — an army of indigenous leaders, charlatans, paid activists, academics, consultants, lawyers, and accountants who are sucking billions of dollars out of aboriginal bands and from various woke, timid, or guilt-ridden governments — ensures real reconciliation is unlikely any time soon.

Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba.

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