Commentary
On May 30, 2021, the Canadian Federation of Students issued a statement to Canadian schools, declaring: “On Thursday, May 27, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found buried in an unmarked mass grave at the Kamloops Residential School [in British Columbia]. These were acts of cultural violence, genocide and colonialism.”
Within days, this unsubstantiated assertion was dialled back by Tk’emlúps Chief Rosanne Casimir, who conceded that the alleged discovery by ground-penetrating radar was not a “mass grave,” but rather possible “individual, unmarked grave sites.” This is important, because “mass grave” usually points to a massacre. But there is no evidence for illicit death at Kamloops or any of the other 150 residential schools over the course of their tenure. In the interlude since the May 27, 2021, announcement, numerous evidence-based articles testifying to that fact by researchers in indigenous affairs have appeared in the Dorchester Review, C2C Journal and the National Post, as well as in these pages….