By Hymie Rubenstein ——Bio and Archives--May 30, 2025
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Four years ago today, May 27, 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc [Kamloops] Indian Band of British Columbia issued a press statement of seismic implications, literally and figuratively. A ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the area surrounding the city’s former Indian Residential School had located the “remains of 215 children who were students” of the school, the Band claimed. Despite making explosive assertions about “missing children” and “undocumented deaths,” the Band was still careful to add that, “At this time, we have more questions than answers.”
Such a note of caution didn’t stop the media, politicians and nearly everyone else from acting as if they had more answers than questions.
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 for almost six months beginning 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.
Still, on this fourth anniversary of a day that will forever live in Canadian infamy, regardless of the eventual outcome, today there are even more questions than answers.
This is exactly how a “big lie” is born and nurtured.
A big lie is a gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth primarily that is employed as a political propaganda technique. The German expression große Lüge was first used by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf (1925) to describe how people could be induced to believe a colossal lie because they could not comprehend that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on one of the country’s generals.
In fact, Nazi Germany's chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels and the Nazi Party manufactured their own version of the big lie to turn long-standing antisemitism in Europe into mass murder by depicting Germany as an innocent, besieged nation striking back at “international Jewry,” which the Nazis blamed for starting World War I.
Big lies never reveal the empirical evidence underlying their false claims simply because there is no such empirical evidence.
It is not surprising then that the Kamloops Band has refused to release the GPR survey results, as promised, and has declined requests from outsiders and Band families to excavate even a single grave.
Big lies are often enhanced by government propaganda and supported by generous funding, the best-known recent example being the myth that the Covid-19 virus was causing a highly lethal pandemic deserving universal vaccination, despite a mountain of evidence that this manufactured pathogen was relatively harmless to most healthy people.
As for Kamloops, refusing to provide any evidence to support “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” did nothing to prevent the Band from being granted $12.1 million in federal funding to help recover these remains.
Instead of trying to do so, these funds were allocated for consultants, publicists, and other administrative costs, according to newly revealed documents.
The Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations pressed the Kamloops Band for details on archaeological and forensic progress: “We are not seeking to intervene in this matter but are trying to understand the approach,” wrote acting director Mandy McCarthy, who inquired about exhumation and DNA testing protocols.
Despite these questions, details about the spending remain censored, and records reveal little evidence of direct fieldwork to locate graves.
That the Kamloops big lie is slowly unravelling, even among its key propagandists, is proven by a May 18, 2024 Band announcement revising the 2021 announcement by changing a single word:
Soil “anomalies” are sub-surface disturbances of unknown origin.
This remarkable change in terminology – from confirmed graves to unspecified anomalies – is surely attributable to the scores of published articles by prominent researchers casting doubt or thoroughly debunking the assertions made not only by the Kamloops leadership but by indigenous leaders and activists like Cree Lawyer Eleanore Sunchild and Chief Bobby Cameron mentioned at the top (see here, here, here, here, and here). Still, these falsehoods continue to be accepted and peddled by most indigenous leaders and advisors, provincial and federal government officials, the mainstream media, particularly the government-owned CBC, and a large segment of the Canadian citizenry.
The most notable publication addressing the Kamloops and associated claims is a December 2023 volume edited by Tom Flanagan and Chris Champion. Available exclusively on Amazon, where it continues to be a best-seller, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools), the collection of articles is largely a response to the deeply flawed and biased six-volume 2015 Truth the Reconciliation Commission (TRC) final report, a study that gained an unexpected new lease of life following the May 27, 2021 announcement by the Kamloops Indian Band.
Many of the essays in Grave Error also challenge the Kamloops claims. Taken together, the 18 articles reveal that the TRC final report on the origin, history, operation, and legacy of the Indian Residential Schools is dominated by totally false or grossly exaggerated assertions, including that:
Challenging these assertions with hard historical evidence has speciously been termed “residential school denialism,” a thinly veiled but spurious allusion to yet another big lie, Holocaust denial.
As in many big lies, the federal Liberal government, together with dozens of regional and national indigenous associations, have invested far too much time, public money, and political capital promoting a false or distorted narrative about the IRSs to backtrack any time soon. In the long run, however, the “missing children buried in unmarked graves” canard, like so many other historical hoaxes, will suffer a painful death.
But it is unlikely that exposing this big lie will adversely affect the special constitutional status of Canada’s indigenous people. Nor will it likely immiserate members of the powerful and lucrative Indian Industry – the army of chiefs, lobbyists, consultants, lawyers, grievance councillors, and accountants who are sucking hundreds of millions of dollars out of Indian Bands from Canadian taxpayers.
Nevertheless, a rigorous search for facts about residential schools is not meant to minimize the suffering that occurred in some of the schools despite the altruistic intentions of the federal government that funded these institutions and the Churches that ran most of them. The health outcomes for native children were often terrible and the many graves of former students furnish ample, heart-rending evidence of this. But it is necessary to recognize context as well as outcome. Mass death by infectious disease was not unique to indigenous Canadians during this time. Nor were conditions at residential schools as worse as the alternative – life on a poverty-stricken, alcohol ridden reserve. In fact, it seems TB was generally introduced into the schools from the reserves. And when better treatments became readily available, they were provided to students at residential schools with salutary results.
There is also ample evidence showing that only a minority of native students ever attended a residential school, that the federal government’s policy of compulsory education spanned only part of the residential school era and, even when operative, was usually weakly enforced. Actual attendance rates were far lower than official enrolment figures, and a drop-out rate of 50 percent between Grades 1 and 2 would surely be considered scandalous in Canada today. As such, it is impossible to sustain an argument that residential schools functioned as “concentration camps” or that the government’s intent was the “genocidal” removal of all indigenous children from their parents.
The pursuit of truth and reconciliation must rest on a firm factual basis.
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.
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Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is editor of —REAL Indigenous Report.