Commentary
Over the last two years, innumerable news reports have been published about missing children and mass or unmarked graves at Indian Residential Schools (IRS) from across Canada. First, the news that the graves of 215 students were discovered at the Kamloops Indian Residential School at the end of May 2021 was shocking, to say the least. (Even I was shocked and I lived and worked in two residential schools.)
Since then, many other reports have claimed that hundreds, if not thousands, of indigenous children died, or were murdered, and their bodies were secretly buried, often in the dead of night. In fact, Justice Murray Sinclair told CBC Radio host Matt Galloway that he thinks that as many as 15,000 to 25,000 IRS students are missing and perhaps murdered. It is with this background that New York Times called its story on the topic “’Horrible History’: Mass Graves of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.”…