RUBENSTEIN: The hole in the bucket has not been plugged

The 2015 Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) claimed it had identified 3,201 confirmed deaths of children who attended the country’s government-supported Indian Residential Schools between 1867 and 2000. It also added that the actual total was likely much higher.Currently, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR,) the ad hoc successor to the TRC, has increased this number to 4,140 deaths as part of its work to create a national death register “to forever remember and honour the children who never returned home from residential schools.”Meanwhile, the late Murray Sinclair, former chief commissioner of the TRC, in 2022 surmised — with no supporting evidence — that the actual number of disappeared children may total 25,000, representing one in six students who ever attended an IRS school..Each of these figures is highly questionable, perhaps even fraudulent. So is the related claim that thousands of indigenous children lie in unmarked mass or individual graves next to their schools.Volume 4 of the Final Report — Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials — lists 423 named and 409 unnamed children who died on school property between 1867 and 2000, 10.2 percent of the 4,140 figure listed in the NCTR’s Memorial Register.The rest died elsewhere, often of causes unrelated to their residential school attendance. The recognition “that the possibility exists that some of the deaths recorded in the Named Register might also be included in the Unnamed Register” is only fleetingly mentioned. This likely resulted in their being counted twice.The TRC even admitted that “The term ‘missing children’ in this context, includes both those who died at school and those whose fate after enrolment was unknown, at least to their parents. This could include, for example, students who might have run away to urban centres and never contacted their home community again, students who never returned to their home communities after leaving school, students who became ill at school and were transferred to a hospital or sanatorium and died there (possibly several years later) without parents being informed, or students who were transferred to other institutions such as reformatories or foster homes and never returned home.”.Why loving parents would not have searched for their ‘missing children’ night and day until they were found suggests that these children were simply forgotten over time.Equally troubling is the refusal of the NCTR to be accountable to the public by archiving all its documents and materials produced “in a manner that will ensure their preservation and accessibility to the public,” as legally required by Schedule N of the IRS Settlement Agreement.The claim that these 3,201 (or 4,140) named and unnamed persons are missing children buried in unmarked graves has also been disputed in meticulous research done by many objective academics and other professionals that can be found here, here, here, here, and here.In particular, this research has revealed that apart from known indigenous cemeteries whose simple wooden crosses would have disintegrated in a few years, no remains of missing IRS students, suspicious or otherwise, have ever been found. This work has also shown that funding agreements with Ottawa required the deaths of IRS students both on school grounds and elsewhere to be carefully recorded. These records are stored in various government and church archives.All this is the backstory to what several observers have seen as a sign that “The ‘Mass Graves’ Hoax Is Officially Dead, And No One Will Be Held Accountable.” This is because media houses like History Reclaimed, the Counter Signal, Canada Free Press, the Daily Wire, and Juno News have uncritically asserted that the government of Canada has stopped all funding support by indigenous bands and other groups searching for “missing IRS children buried in unmarked graves.”Not surprisingly, the only media outlet that got the story right was Canada’s government-owned public broadcaster, the CBC, which has a significant “woke” stake in keeping the “missing children buried in unmarked graves” story alive.Contrary to the assertions of those peddling the notion that the “mass graves hoax is officially dead,” presumably based on the fact that the Kamloops alleged burials and their many copycats across the land have produced nothing but disturbed soil anomalies, the funding spigot is far from having been turned off, as shown on the federal government and other websites found here.In particular, although funding for the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children and Unmarked Burials has been terminated, all but one other of many revenue sources remains intact.The second exception is the Survivors’ Secretariat, a non-profit organization in Brantford, Ontario, leading efforts to investigate the Mohawk Institution, Canada’s oldest and longest-running residential school.Between 2021-22 and 2023-24, the Mohawk Survivors’ Secretariat received some $10.3 million from the RSMCCSF but has revealed nothing to the public about its findings because there is nothing to reveal.As for the original $321 million Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund (RSMCCSF) funding source, it was restored on August 24, 2024, “in direct response to concerns and feedback received from Indigenous leaders and communities.”In a recent written statement to CBC News, Pascal Laplante, a spokesperson for the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations, said responding to the TRC’s calls to action is “incredibly important.”Laplante said communities would continue to receive funding through the massive RSMCCSF “as they pursue efforts to identify children who did not return home from residential schools.”What all this means is that the fruitless search for “missing indigenous children buried in unmarked graves next to their schools” is far from “officially dead.”Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

RUBENSTEIN: The hole in the bucket has not been plugged

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