Terry Glavin: Canada slowly acknowledging there never was a 'mass grave' (2024)

Long before Stephen Harper’s Conservative government launched the multi-billion-dollar Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement that established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007, it was already commonplace to refer to the legacy of those schools as a “dark chapter in Canadian history.”

There was much that was dark about the schools. Many of the church-run, federally-administered institutions, whatever the good intentions of the religious orders that ran them, were dark and forbidding places that incubated disease, cultural dislocation, abuse and despair, for much of their history. Roughly 150,000 children are believed to have attended the schools, which the federal government took over in the 1890s. Most Indigenous kids were attending day schools by the 1970s, but the last of the schools didn’t close their doors until 1996.

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Three years ago this week, another cliché entered the public lexicon. Derived partly from a kind of collective amnesia, a “long overdue reckoning” with the schools’ implications was the language almost universally employed to describe what ended up taking on the characteristics of an episode of national mass hysteria.

It began on May 27, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc chief Rosanne Casimir issued a press release announcing “an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented.” In the work of a ground-penetrating radar 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.”

It was a Thursday. Immediately, headlines around the world picked up on the story. The New York Times set the tone, on the Friday: ‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada. Casimir hadn’t said anything about a mass grave, but the die was cast.

On Saturday, May 29, CTV’s Evan Solomon was peppering Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde: “How many mass graves might there be around residential schools? And what does that tell us? There could be untold numbers of children who were killed, that we don’t even know about. . . . Maybe they died, and they were buried in these mass graves, and they destroyed their records. How do we know?”

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That evening CTV News was reporting shockwaves rolling across the country: “The discovery of the mass grave is gripping the nation tonight. . .” By then, Trudeau had already lowered the flag on Parliament Hill. By Monday, the flag was down on all federal buildings across the country. The Toronto Star’s Monday edition: Mass grave of Indigenous children discovered in Kamloops BC. The CBC, also on Monday: “After childrens’ mass grave found, advocates say it’s time to scan all residential school sites.”

On Tuesday, June 1, Chief Casimir tried to set the record straight, referring to ground-penetrating radar surveys as the “initial horrific findings of what potentially could be, they are very preliminary. . . there could very well be children beneath the surface.” Three days later, on Friday, Chief Casimir was even more emphatic: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.”

This week, being the third anniversary, Chief Casimir announced a “day of reflection,” with almost exactly the same wording as her 2021 statement, but with an important difference. Casimir described the same “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented,” only this time it was that “the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of 215 anomalies were detected.” (emphasis mine).

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Anomalies, not “the remains of 215 children.”

In the months following the reported discovery of the Kamloops “mass grave” in 2021, replications of the claim spread from one former residential school site to another — Penalakut, St, Eugene’s, Marieval, Shubenacadie and so on — until the “missing children” reportedly discovered in unmarked graves across Canada ended up numbering roughly 1,300.

In each case, however, although you’d never have known it from the tabloid-shock headlines, where there were burials at all they turned out to be either graves in known cemeteries, or merely instances of hyperbolic conjecture.

Nonetheless, the Kamloops story sparked a national paroxysm of shame and anger. It came on the anniversary of the Black Lives Matter riots in the United States, and Carolyn Bennett, who was Crown-Indigenous relations minister at the time, said the news out of Kamloops should serve as a catalyst along the lines of the murder of George Floyd, the Black man murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

Across Canada, there were riots, dozens of churches were burned, statues were toppled, and the Trudeau government decided to keep flags at half-staff on all federal buildings for more than five months.

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You could say that Panic of 2021 was itself a “dark chapter in Canadian history,” and its lasting damage to Canadians’ sense of their own history is not entirely incalculable. Last October, an Angus Reid poll showed that nearly one in five Canadians believe the horribly high mortality rates in the schools were not due to the known causes of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, but rather the result of children being deliberately killed.

Within the T’Kemlups community, however, almost from the beginning there were serious misgivings about the way their story was being told. The 14 major families within the community made it known to Casimir early on that an excavation of the orchard site should begin as soon as possible. Three years and nearly $8 million in federal funding later, no excavation has occurred.

Chief Casimir says the work being done is “in compliance with Secwépemc laws, legal traditions, worldviews, values and protocols.” However: “Our investigative findings and investigative steps are currently being kept confidential to preserve the integrity of the investigation.”

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Just where the stories about secret nighttime burials in the orchard came from is also shrouded in contradiction and conspiracy theory. The stories first came to public attention around 2006, when the defrocked United Church Minister Kevin Annett was in Kamloops with tall tales about Queen Elizabeth taking children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School on a picnic, and the children were never seen again.

Annett was the convenor of an imaginary “International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State” who claimed that Queen Elizabeth was named in an arrest warrant issued by the similarly imaginary “International Common Law Court of Justice in Brussels.” One of Annett’s Indigenous collaborators at the time was a certain William Combes, who claims to have witnessed the burial of a child in a hole dug in the orchard when he was enrolled at the Kamloops institution.

But T’Kemlups elder Emma Baker, who attended the residential school in the 1950s, told CTV News three years ago that she and her friends used to concoct scary stories about graves on the schoolgrounds. “There was a big orchard there and we used to make up stories of the graveyard being in the orchard,” Baker told CTV News Channel on Saturday. “There was rumours of a graveyard, but nobody seemed to know where it was and we didn’t even know if it was true.”

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The credibility of the 2021 ground-penetrating radar study was also thrown into doubt in 2022 when Casimir and her council were presented with an independent site analysis showing that the anomalies were less likely graves and more likely the result of decades of ground disturbances — irrigation ditches, utility lines, backhoe trenches, archeological digs, water lines, drainage tiles and so on.

But to even point out facts that run counter to Ottawa’s “narrative” is to commit an act of “residential school denialism,” and the federal government isn’t going to tolerate anything like that. The recent federal budget set aside $5 million over the next three years to allow Crown Indigenous Relations — Northern Affairs Canada to “establish a program to combat denialism, a species of thoughtcrime that a succession of federal cabinet ministers has stated a willingness to consider criminalizing.

Last June, combating “residential school denialism” was a major focus of the 175-page interim report by Kimberly Murray, Ottawa’s Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools. Murray’s office is supposed to expire this year, but the push to criminalize dissent from residential-school orthodoxy should be expected to persist.

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A key element of Murray’s report was its assertion that to dispute the proposition that Canada’s residential schools constituted genocide, or to make a case for the schools’ sometimes benign features, is to engage in denialism, which is to engage in “violence” and a form of “hate speech” that should be outlawed.

Last year, a Senate Indigenous People’s Committee report said “denialism” would include criticisms of the credibility of the Tk’emlúps documentation of the orchard graves hypothesis. “Denialism serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials and unmarked graves,” concluded the report.

Earlier this week, the Assembly of First Nations’ B.C. Regional Chief Terry Teegee suggested that the absence of any physical evidence of human remains in suspected grave sites could be explained by the “incinerators” that were present at most residential schools.

In any case, since the Kamloops story broke, the federal government has committed $320 million to assist in the search of residential school sites across Canada and to support “survivors.” The Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund is for communities and families to research, locate and document burial sites, as well as to memorialize the deaths of children and return remains home.

The project is funded to the end of next year.

National Post

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