On 27 May 2021, the Chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc — a First Nations government in British Columbia — announced that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had located the remains of 215 “missing children”. These were allegedly “undocumented deaths” from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which had closed 52 years ago.
The young anthropologist who conducted the GPR search later added a note of caution: only a forensic investigation could confirm that these were indeed burials. But a moral panic had already been unleashed. Politicians and the media immediately seized on the first announcement, and “burials of missing children” was the storyline that ricocheted around Canada and much of the world. Meanwhile, several other First Nations that had at one time hosted residential schools hired their own anthropologists armed with GPR and announced similar discoveries. Weeks later, almost exactly a year ago, in June 2021, the Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of another former residential school in Saskatchewan.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response on 30 May by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal building to honour the “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school”, thus elevating the possible burials to the status of murder victims and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children. Unprecedented in Canadian history, flags remained at half-mast until Remembrance Day, 11 November, and were returned to normal height only after the Assembly of First Nations gave its OK.
In spite of this ostentatious virtue-signalling, Trudeau got into trouble when he skipped an event in Kamloops on 30 September to commemorate the missing children. Apparently, our surfer dude prime minister preferred to ride the waves at Tofino on the Pacific coast rather than attend a commemorative ceremony. To make up for his faux pas, he had to go to Kamloops on 18 October for another memorial ceremony, at which he was harangued for several hours.
But not all the events in the wake of the Kamloops announcement were so amusing. Sixty-eight Christian churches, mostly Roman Catholic, were vandalised or even burned to the ground. Many of these were historical church buildings still used and revered by native people. The pretext for arson and vandalism was that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been run by a Catholic religious order, as had 43% of all residential schools. Imagine the outrage if 68 synagogues or mosques had been vandalised and burned. Yet the attacks on 68 Catholic churches passed with only mild criticism.
An article in the New York Times was typical of media commentary about the unmarked graves. It was first published under the headline “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada” on 28 May and updated on 5 October under the same title. It asserted that: “For decades, most Indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools. A large number never returned home, their families given only vague explanations, or none at all.”
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