If I found what I suspected to be human remains on my property, I would call the police, the area would be taped off and investigators would methodically excavate to determine if there are indeed bodies, how many bodies there are, and then try to determine why and how the bodies ended up there..I couldn’t tell police, “Hey, I found some burial mounds on my land and I have some neighbours who assure me they contain the remains of murdered children. I want to see apologies from those accused of killing these children, and compensation for those potentially related to those children. Aside from that though, I don’t want you on my land and those mounds must remain untouched!”.Trying to tell police not to investigate such an event sounds absurd but that is exactly what has happened with the Kamloops Residential School issue..It has been 14 months since ground-penetrating radar (GPR) identified anomalies in what was once an apple orchard next to an Indian residential school in Kamloops. There is no evidence aside from the GPR anomalies of graves being in that location aside from anecdotes from people who attended the school decades ago..There is no record of missing children. No families identified who lost children during the period of the alleged burials. No attestations of burials from the many indigenous people who were employed at the school..It is all based on stories that children told each other of secret nighttime burials happening in the orchard over 60 years ago..I worked with ground penetrating radar while working in the Arctic. We used it to determine ice thicknesses on the Beaufort Sea so we could safely travel on it. For that application, GPR is fabulously accurate. What GPR does is record differences in density. Water and ice have distinctly different densities and the GPR can easily determine ice thickness..That said, we still didn’t rely 100% on our GPR data. We had protocols requiring regular measurements of the ice thickness with an auger and a long measuring rod to ensure the accuracy of the GPR survey..That’s it though. It doesn’t provide snapshots of subsurface items. It doesn’t give a 3D image of what is going on below it. It can only tell you that there have been some changes in density..For graves, GPR could work well. A hole that was dug and filled even decades ago will show distinctly in a GPR survey. The thing is though, many other things can look the same way. An old trench for irrigation would show as an anomaly every time the GPR passed it. An old shed site, outhouses or pathways where ground got impacted would present as anomalies..Old root balls from former apple trees would look much like burial sites as well..Our nation was turned upside down over anomalies registered on a GPR unit..Our flags were kept at half-mast for nearly six months, churches were burned, apologies were offered and billions in more settlements are pending..Why on earth are we not verifying the data from the GPR survey yet?.As far as can be seen, not a teaspoon worth of dirt has been moved to try and determine what happened..Maybe there are indeed the remains of hundreds of children who vanished and had been secretly buried by residential school workers. In that case, I want to see those bodies exhumed and a criminal investigation carried out..Maybe there are hundreds of bodies of Spanish explorers down there and it is a valuable archeological site..Maybe there isn’t a single body in the area and we will need to re-examine just how much weight we give to anecdotal, oral history on serious matters..Until a true, forensic investigation is done, we are left with speculation..If such a crime has happened, wouldn’t the relations of the victims be eager to get the full picture? Find the facts? Pursue those responsible?.Why are we waiting on this?.I fear the answer may come down to money, as so many things do..The mystery is much more lucrative than the reality might be. There are a lot of people making a whole lot of money from the residential school issue. That pipeline of cash could come to a halt if it is determined that there never was a mass murder of children..It’s time to start digging. This is too serious to keep putting it off.
