Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.According to BC online newsletter Castanet, Chief Rosanne Casimir, leader of the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc, legally known as the Kamloops Band, says grave exhumation is part of an effort to determine what lies beneath the grounds of the reserve’s former boarding school.The band made international headlines on May 27, 2021, when Casimir announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected what it initially described as the remains of 215 children near the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School..May 2021 media release from the Kamloops First Nation, also known as Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc since 2012.As she has said several times since this sensational press release, this process can't be rushed.At first, her claim was accepted, almost universally, as gospel truth. But as the days, weeks, months, and now years passed, it became clear that this announcement of missing children buried in unmarked graves was a falsehood.The Kamloops Band eventually transformed missing children into anomalies — soil disturbances with unknown contents — after the limitations of ground-penetrating radar became widely known.No missing schoolchildren, in the remote past or in recent years, have ever been identified by their grieving parents. .The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented in its 2015 report that 51 children died at the Kamloops school between 1914 and 1963, a far cry from the 215 announced by Casimir in 2021. Likewise, only one or two of these 51 children remain unaccounted for. The so-called graveyard in question had been subjected to considerable soil disturbance over the decades, including the laying of clay drainage tiles that could resemble small coffins.Regardless of contrary evidence, the chief of the Kamloops Band and those around her continued to push the buried-children narrative, even as a disinterment or two would produce the necessary evidence one way or the other.Once again, Casimir has said her band wants to ensure every investigative, cultural, and community-led step is completed before moving ahead with an excavation, which she said must be approached carefully because of its sensitive nature.For many observers, this is equivalent to putting the cart before the horse: finding or not finding the remains should be the first step in determining whether indigenous schoolchildren were actually buried in what was an apple orchard for many years.Not so, claims Casimir."Exhumation is a part of that process moving forward, but when that's going to be — for myself — it's part of that path, but it's also ensuring we don't miss any steps along that way before doing that, because it is very intrusive," Casimir told Castanet.As usual, she failed to answer a question many people have long asked: why hasn’t even a single grave been excavated using one of several minimally invasive excavation procedures?.She also opined that "We want to keep our commitment to truth and accountability," ignoring the elementary fact that she and her band have offered neither for over five years.During this past National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, September 30, Casimir said future decisions about excavation would be informed by the completion of appropriate investigative, cultural, and community-led processes, something she has repeatedly claimed in the past.Even if these processes are necessary, the question of why they have taken so long to complete went unaddressed.She told Castanet that work includes guidance from the band's team of experts and engagement with the 38 nations whose children attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School.Casimir surely knows that gaining unanimous consent to proceed with exhumation would be nearly impossible. She also knows that her band has the legal right to exhume without outside permission.Casimir said the band's investigative team is also preparing yet another report updating its work at the former school, which she expects will be released "in the very near future,” ignoring the fact that the initial 2021 ground-penetrating radar report still has not been made available for public scrutiny.She claimed it is too early to say what that update will contain, a highly questionable assertion given how much time (nearly six years) and taxpayers’ money (over $12 million) have been expended on a search with no end and what looks more and more like a fabricated beginning.All we know about the band’s current investigative efforts comes from vague statements that additional work has helped narrow the search for possible burials..For example, follow-up searches, allegedly using cadaver dogs and laser scanning, are said to have refined the band's understanding of the contents of the anomalies.In February, for example, the band said it had identified overlapping signatures resembling burials in some areas, while ruling out other locations. Some areas could still not be confidently excluded as possible burial sites, it was claimed.The band also said radar and laser scanning had ruled out utility lines and clay tiles as explanations for anomalies in some of the locations under investigation.None of the contents of any of these studies have ever been released to the public or confirmed by impartial investigators not on the band’s payroll.Now, Casimir has added a new time-extending twist to the search: she claims potentially important residential school records could be destroyed before they can be reviewed to determine whether they contain information relevant to the missing children.The records, which are scheduled for destruction in September 2027, include confidential testimony collected through the Independent Assessment Process, which handled compensation claims from former residential school students who claimed, without cross-examination or corroboration, that they were abused, sexually or otherwise, at the residential schools they attended.A 2017 court ruling ordered the records destroyed after 15 years because participants were told their testimony would remain private. Survivors can choose to preserve their own records, but hardly any have done so, itself a telling fact about the so-called victims of alleged but legally unproven abuse..Meanwhile, Casimir has shown indifference to a comprehensive RCMP task force report that would answer all the questions about the so-called missing children. Fifteen BC Indian Residential Schools, including the one on the Kamloops reserve, were included in the task force’s multi-year investigation.In its 2003 report, under the heading Unlawful/Suspicious Deaths, the task force said this about the charges made against the schools and their personnel: “These ranged from outright allegations of murder to deaths caused by negligence, and even included allegations that babies were being killed and buried on the school grounds. Each of these allegations was thoroughly investigated by both the Task Force and the applicable Sub-Division Major Crime Unit. Not one of these allegations has ever been substantiated, let alone proven, and in many cases, the investigation has established that the death was due to either disease or some other natural cause: in some cases, the alleged victim was found to be alive several years after his supposed death.”Contrary to Casimir’s constant pleas for more time to discover the truth about the Kamloops missing children, none of her claims remotely resemble the truth.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
