By Hymie Rubenstein ——Bio and Archives--December 23, 2023
Canadian News, Politics | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
The claim that thousands of Indigenous children who attended Canada’s Indian Residential Schools between 1883 and 1996 are buried in “mass graves” across Canada, reputed victims of genocide, is being exposed as a hoax, albeit at a snail’s pace.
Such exposure is hardly unexpected given the claim’s lack of supporting historical or physical evidence.
Though the still widely held missing children and genocide claims have been bandied about for decades, their widespread promotion began on May 27, 2021, with a media release from a British Columbia Indian Reserve heard around the world:
Related:
There has never been any such “confirmation,” only the briefest summary of the ground penetrating radar (GPR) results. The full report has never been made available and there are still more questions than answers.
The Kamloops “confirmation” – growing more inconclusive as time has passed – consisted solely of signs of sub-surface soil irregularities, not images of human or other organic remains because GPR cannot detect organic material, human or otherwise, and is only highly reliable in finding graves in known cemeteries.
The Kamloops discovery became Canada’s George Floyd moment. Almost instantly there were angry vigils, public displays of grief and shame, solidarity speeches and promises to revolutionize society as we know it. Flags on government buildings were lowered to half-mast on Canada Day, turning what was once a day of national celebration into one of national mourning and recrimination. Statues of former Canadian heroes were defaced, destroyed or removed, alongside more demands to rename streets and public schools. There were calls for yet another apology by the Roman Catholic Church. Some Catholics even claimed to have lost their faith over the announcement, as dozens of churches of many denominations were vandalized and burnt both on and off Indigenous reserves.
The furore attending the Kamloops discovery accelerated as subsequent findings were announced in other provinces, with the number of purportedly identified graves soon exceeding 2,000. Frequently heard among the many public demonstrations and outcries at these announcements was that they amounted to proof of a heretofore hidden “Holocaust” or “Final Solution” perpetrated by Canada against its Indigenous population. The Kamloops school was alleged to have been a “concentration camp” and the now-revealed burials evidence of a horrific crime.
Although the dam is far from having been burst on what increasingly looks like a burial hoax, it was damaged on August 18, 2023. That was when the 14 closely-spaced soil disturbances detected last year using GPR in the basement of the church on the site of the former Pine Creek Residential School turned out to contain animal bones and debris, not human remains.
Nepinak said he knows the results of the Pine Creek excavation will further the narrative that claims alleging mass burial sites of Indigenous children who died while under the care of former residential schools are false but failed to mention that other searches, such as the following ones, have been equally inconclusive.
In August 2021, a team of researchers in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia conducted an excavation at the former Shubenacadie Residential School in search of clandestine burials but to no avail.
In October of 2021, an search was conducted for unmarked graves on the site of former Camsell Hospital in Edmonton. The hospital used to treat Indigenous people who suffered from tuberculosis and some believed that the dig would uncover patients that had been buried there, but no such evidence was discovered
Support Canada Free Press
Following archival and other work by a handful of curious researchers, it is increasingly clear that the Kamloops claim, and the many copycat allegations it fomented, are fallacious. More commentators are awaking to the “mass grave” fake propaganda, even though the Canadian mainstream media barely responded to the Pine Creek discovery of presumptive graves containing no human remains.
Indeed, this and other negative findings have not stopped the cries of genocide based on lurid but unproven tales of residential school students brutally murdered and secretly buried in “mass graves” across the country. These include unbelievable horror stories of children’s bodies hanging in barns, babies being thrown into incinerators, and priests clubbing children to death and throwing them into pits or off balconies, unsubstantiated stories still circulating in Indigenous communities and on social media.
One of the outlandish Indigenous stories underpinning the genocide mantra comes from St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School on the Williams Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia, where GPR results released on January 25, 2022, revealed 93 soil disturbances near the school that were termed “potential graves that require further analysis.”
According to the band’s chief, Willie Sellars, the discovery took place on a 14-hectare parcel of land at and around the St. Joseph’s Mission site.
Sellars said the real story of what occurred at the St. Joseph’s Mission has been intentionally obscured for generations and that his investigation team “recorded not only stories involving the murder and disappearance of children and infants, they have listened to countless stories of systematic torture, starvation, rape and sexual assault of children at St. Joseph’s Mission.”
Over a year and a half later, no further announcements have been made about these GPR findings or the allegations of murder and abuse at this school, a hit-and-run process mimicked by nearly every other announcement like it.
Another inconclusive but overblown burial announcement began on June 24, 2021, a month after the Kamloops announcement, about the discovery of 751 soil anomalies using GPR on Saskatchewan’s Cowessess Indian Reserve. Chief Cadmus Delorme, the community’s leader, said, “This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves” in a known but abandoned cemetery that is thought to contain the bodies of adults and children of different nationalities.
This measured statement did not prevent Chief Bobby Cameron, head of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations representing 74 Indian Reserves in Saskatchewan from immediately distorting this find by stating, “They will find more bodies and they won’t stop until they locate everyone who was killed by the state and the churches.”
Over two years later, no other “evidence” has been forthcoming.
Among the most prominent perpetrators of this inflammatory mode of data interpretation and promotion has been RoseAnne Archibald, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada’s largest and best-known Indigenous lobbying group.
At a July 15, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band public presentation and media event to present a few more details about the GPR survey, Archibald maintained that the Kamloops case told the world “how 215 innocent children died and were buried in unmarked graves” and that this “crime against humanity” constituted “genocide.”
Completely ignoring the caution expressed by all the known researchers conducting these band-sponsored GPR searches, Archibald added that “this ground penetrating technology is revealing evidence, undisputable proof, that crimes were committed.”
Similar comments were made by Don Worme, legal counsel for the Kamloops band, at the same event: “I think what we can say firstly is that it is undeniable that those are graves. There is no question that there have been children gone missing. Our knowledge keepers from this community have told us so. We believe them.”
In an interview broadcast by the BBC on August 4, 2021, Archibald charged that Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were “designed to kill” Indigenous children. “And we are seeing proof of that,” she said. “1,600 children, innocent children, have been recovered so far…. We are going to be in the thousands upon ten thousands of children found. I am not sure how you can say that the recovery of that many little children does not signify what it is – genocide.”
Chief Archibald failed to mention that not a single child “has been recovered so far.” Still, peddling a victimless genocide is just as preposterous as most other contemporary Indigenous claims.
Tomorrow Part 2
View Comments
Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is editor of —REAL Indigenous Report.