This article was originally published in Woke Watch Canada. It has been republished with the author’s permission. Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Details on how to support the work of WWC are available at the original link.
Did the BC government fly the Canadian flag at half-mast at the Legislature from August 15-17 2025 for 81 phantom children who never existed?
It did.
In a posting on X on 15 August 2025, the BC government stated that:
The #BCLeg Canadian flag is flying at half-mast until sunset on Sun, Aug. 17 to honour the shíshálh Nation, and the survivors, families, and communities impacted by trauma and loss at the former Sechelt residential school. Our thoughts are with those mourning and remembering.
What prompted the BC government to fly the Canadian flag at half-mast for three days was University of Saskatchewan archaeologist Dr Terry Clark’s claim to have ‘discovered’ 41 more unmarked graves at Sechelt, bringing Dr Clark’s total of unmarked graves of phantom children to 81, the previous 40 having been ‘discovered’ by him in 2023 (see below).
By lowering the Canadian flag to half-mast, the BC government clearly signalled to Canadians that they must believe these children are real, and must mourn their alleged murder and clandestine burial at the former St Augustine’s Indian Residential School.
However in a letter to the Speaker of the BC Legislature, BC MLA Tara Armstrong called the BC government’s lowering of the flag ‘shameful’, pointing out that neither the BC government nor the Sechelt Band had provided an iota of evidence that anything nefarious had occurred. Armstrong emphasized that:
(1) the Band’s claims rely on GPR, which can only identify soil disturbances, not human remains;
(2) the Band provided no information as to the location of these GPR discoveries; and
(3) the Band’s statements ‘falsely and irresponsibly’ imply that children were murdered as, for example, this statement in the Band’s press release of 15 August 2025:
“Survivors have carried these horrors, and the disappearances of their siblings, cousins, and peers, in addition to their own experiences,” said Joe, describing accounts of children being led by staff into the forest in the middle of the night, never to return, and child witnesses who were punished for asking questions.
As Armstrong noted, the Sechelt Band, while recklessly proclaiming that children were murdered and clandestinely buried, provided no evidence that any such thing occurred:
No evidence or details are provided. The implication—that teachers secretly murdered children and buried them in unmarked graves—is grotesque and wholly unsupported. Publication of such claims without substantiation is reckless. Worse, the band refused media interviews after releasing its statements, preventing journalists and the public from assessing credibility.
Armstrong could have added a fourth significant point:
(4) Neither the BC government nor the Sechelt Band provided the name of a single missing or murdered child, despite the fact that Sechelt Band Chief Lenora Joe insisted that the names of all 81 children were very well known to the Band’s Elders, describing them as ‘their siblings, their cousins, their peers‘.
Why did the BC government and Chief Joe not reveal any names? Because these tales by Sechelt Band Elders about missing and murdered children are entirely fictitious. There are no missing Indian residential school children – in Sechelt, or anywhere. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s spurious 8-year-long Missing Children Project failed to produce the name of a single child who was missing and unaccounted for in the entire history of Indian residential schools in Canada.
Despite the fact that the BC government and the Sechelt Band have refused to tell Canadians where the alleged 81 burials are located, can the locations be identified?
Although the BC government and the Sechelt Band have refused to disclose where the burials of these 81 phantom children are located, the Band could not resist obliquely documenting the GPR sites for posterity in the two videos it released on 20 April 2023 and 15 August 2025.
The videos are skilfully produced to evoke feelings of sadness, guilt and confusion in non-Indigenous Canadians. Chief Joe takes centre stage, and as she speaks, images of solemn Sechelt Band leaders and Elders are interspersed with fleeting shots of GPR machines and incomprehensible GPR results on computer screens which leave viewers baffled as to where the GPR work took place and what was actually found. The overall impression conveyed by these professionally produced videos is that the two separate GPR ‘discoveries’ by Dr Terry Clark in 2023 and 2025 in which he claims to have found a total of 81 buried children are very real, and something Canadians should feel deeply upset about and ashamed of on behalf of their country.
But is that the case? Are Dr Clark’s two ‘discoveries’ real? Should Canadians feel upset and ashamed?
Let’s examine Dr Terry Clark’s two GPR ‘discoveries’ separately.
Sechelt Band video 20 April 2023 (transcript)
Dr Terry Clark’s first GPR ‘discovery’ at Sechelt in 2023
Dr Terry Clark’s first GPR ‘discovery’ was announced on 20 April 2023 in a press release and video entitled ‘Results of the shíshálh Ground Penetration Radar’ (see attached transcript) in which Chief Lenora Joe claimed that the shallow unmarked graves of 40 young children lying in the fetal position had been found, saying:
The GPR identifies 40 unmarked children’s graves, shallow graves, only large enough for the young bodies to lay in the fetal position.
Chief Joe made it clear that no information would be provided to Canadians about the location of these 40 burials:
We are still processing and we are not comfortable disclosing exact locations.
Despite the Chief not being ‘comfortable’ disclosing the location of the 40 burials, images appear briefly on screen in the Band’s 20 April 2023 video which obliquely reveal that the site of Dr Terry Clark’s 40 GPR ‘hits’ in 2023 is a parking lot in the House of Hewhiwus complex, the Sechelt Band’s administrative and commercial development and tourist destination on the Sunshine Coast Highway.
According to a 14 April 2022 article in the Coast Reporter, the complex, built on the site of the former St Augustine’s Indian Residential School, is ‘a sprawling campus that forms the administrative and cultural headquarters of the shíshálh Nation’.
The complex includes two Band administration buildings and the Band’s Health and Social Development/Kwenis building as well as cultural and tourist attractions – the Tems Swiya Museum, the Tsain-Ko Gift Shop, and the Raven’s Cry Theatre – and a number of businesses.
The oblique clues which point to the Sechelt Band’s ‘administrative and cultural headquarters’ as the location of Dr Terry Clark’s first GPR ‘discovery’ occur about minute 1:06 in the 20 April 2023 video. As Chief Joe says the words, ‘The GPR identifies 40 unmarked children’s graves’, the camera briefly focuses on two people with a GPR machine on the paved roadway between the two Band administration buildings in the complex. That image is immediately followed by a shot of a laptop computer screen. On the left of the screen is a list of GPR depth slices, and on the right is a shot of a parking lot on which a blue rectangle is superimposed. On the rectangle are a series of red dots signifying the 40 ‘murdered children’ buried under the asphalt (see the attached screenshot). To the right of the blue rectangle is the Sechelt Band’s Government District building at 5545 Sunshine Coast Highway, and above the blue rectangle is the Band’s Main Administration Office at 5555 Sunshine Coast Highway. At the bottom of the blue rectangle, and slightly to the left of it, is the Band’s Health and Social Development/Kwenis building at 5559 Sunshine Coast Highway.
Google Maps view of the Sechelt Band
In other words, Dr Clark claims to have ‘discovered’ 40 children’s graves in the ‘administrative and cultural headquarters’ built by the Band itself on the site of the former St Augustine’s Indian Residential School.
The federal government school narrative for St Augustine’s (see attachment) says the school building was destroyed by fire in an act of arson in 1975 after it had been turned over to the Band by the federal government. However although the building was destroyed by fire, the foundations remained and had to be removed when the Band redeveloped the site, and further excavation was done in the course of the erection of new buildings, installation of utilities, and the grading and paving of parking areas, yet during these large-scale excavations of the former school site, the Band discovered no children’s bodies.
St. Augustine’s School Narrative
Why were no children’s bodies discovered? Obviously because there were never any children’s bodies there. And in fact at the time no one in the Sechelt Band even claimed there were bodies there. We have it from former Chief Warren Paull himself that no remains were found when the Sechelt Band redeveloped the site in the early 1990s, and that in fact, although Elders were telling ‘horrific stories’ about the disposal of bodies at the time, those horror stories didn’t involve burial. According to Chief Paull:
While some students are buried in the nation’s cemetery, remains were never found when the site of the residential school was redeveloped to build the nation’s administrative buildings. Horrific stories circulate about how bodies were disposed of, according to Paull – which don’t include burial at all.
Chief Paull’s admission gives rise to important questions. Why didn’t the Elders who led Dr Terry Clark in 2023 to children’s burials in the parking lot at the Band’s complex built on the former residential school site say anything about burials when the Band was excavating and redeveloping the site in the early 1990s? Was it because the extensive excavations the Band was carrying out in the early 1990s would have revealed the Elders’ stories to be false had the Elders tried to claim there were burials there at that time?
Another obvious question arises from Chief Paull’s admission. If the Band found no children’s bodies when it extensively excavated and redeveloped the former school site in the early 1990s, what did Dr Terry Clark’s GPR machine actually find beneath the asphalt in the parking lot in 2023? By Chief Paull’s own admission, it couldn’t have been the burials of 40 children. So what was it?
The arrangement of 40 red dots in straight lines on the GPR team’s laptop screen suggests that what Dr Clark found was long-forgotten infrastructure such as buried pipes.
Obviously the Sechelt Band would not have wanted Canadians asking whether Dr Clark had found long-forgotten buried pipes, and accordingly Chief Joe explicitly told Canadians in her 20 April 2023 video not to ask questions, claiming that asking questions would cause trauma to First Nations people.
In fact, what asking questions would likely reveal is that the Sechelt Band doesn’t want Canadians to know where Dr Terry Clark’s first 40 GPR ‘hits’ are located because the Band doesn’t want to shut down its House of Hewhiwus complex, as happened when the false claim of the ‘discovery of the remains of 215 children‘ forced the Kamloops Band to permanently cordon off as ‘Sacred Ground’ its Heritage Park and Museum where the alleged remains had been found. If the Sechelt Band had revealed the location in 2023, the Band would have had to cordon off the complex, preventing tourists and Sechelt residents from accessing the Raven’s Cry Theatre, the Tems Swiya Museum, the Tsain-Ko Gift Shop, the two Band administration buildings and Health and Social Development/Kwenis building, and several commercial enterprises, a very undesirable outcome from the Sechelt Band’s point of view.
Because the Band concealed the location in 2023 and didn’t cordon off the area, tourists and residents of Sechelt have since then unwittingly walked over and parked their vehicles on the burials of these 40 alleged ‘murdered children’ on a daily basis. See this street view from the Sechelt Coast Highway which shows four vehicles parked on top of the location at which Dr Clark claims to have found 40 buried children. See also the two attached screenshots, one of which shows two vehicles in the distance parked on top of the burial area while the other shows a vehicle parked next to the Band’s Health and Social Development/Kwenis building, again right on top of the alleged 40 children’s burials.
Vehicles parked on area of GPR work (image via Google satellite)
Two vehicles in distance parked on site of GPR results
We thus have a bizarre situation. In the Band’s 20 April 2023 video, a tearful Chief Joe claimed to have ‘cried every day’ while awaiting the GPR results, and to have been ‘shocked to the core’ by Dr Clark’s discovery of the burials of 40 children, yet the Sechelt Band actually displays so little regard for the burials of these 40 children that it permits tourists and Sechelt residents to regularly walk over and park their vehicles on them every day.
How can this be explained? Why would the Band be shocked and tearful at Dr Terry Clark’s discovery, yet let people walk over and park their vehicles on the 40 burials?
The answer seems obvious. The Band knew in 2023 that Dr Clark had found nothing because the entire site had been excavated when the Band redeveloped it in the early 1990s, and as former Chief Warren Paull asserted, not only were no children’s bodies found during those excavations, but the ‘horrific stories’ Elders were telling in the early 1990s didn’t even involve burials. There was thus no reason for the Band to cordon off the site and shut down its ‘administrative and cultural headquarters’ to honour what the Band knew to be 40 phantom children who never existed. At the same time, however, the Band’s 20 April 2023 press release and video establish that the Band wanted Canadians to believe there actually are 40 children buried there, and to feel deeply sad and guilty about what the Band knows are merely 40 phantoms.
The location of Dr Terry Clark’s second GPR ‘discovery’ at Sechelt in 2025
The Sechelt Band’s handling of Dr Terry Clark’s second GPR ‘discovery’ at Sechelt in 2025 is even more deceptive.
Dr Clark’s second ‘discovery’ was announced by Chief Joe on 15 August 2025 in a press release accompanied by yet another professionally-produced video entitled ‘shíshálh Residential School Survivors lead researchers to locate an additional 41 unmarked graves’.
Sechelt Band Video 15 August 2025 (transcript)
As with Dr Terry Clark’s first GPR ‘discovery’, Chief Lenora Joe provided no details in her video of either the location of the ‘discovery’, or the names of the additional 41 children whose unmarked graves Dr Clark claimed to have found, bringing his total to 81. The Band’s press release merely claimed that children were ‘stolen’, and that horror stories told by Elders had guided the GPR work:
shíshálh Nation is saddened by the findings of an additional 41 unmarked graves identified by archaeologists, bringing the community total to 81.
In 2023, shíshálh Nation announced the first results of the ground-penetrating radar (GPR) scans within the areas in and around the former St. Augustine’s Residential School grounds.
“We are deeply saddened, but these numbers are not a surprise to us. We have always believed our Elders. This wasn’t a school, it wasn’t a choice, and the children who attended were stolen,” said Chief Lenora Joe. “We didn’t need the GPR to prove this happened; we always had enough proof to know.”
In the last 18 months, the GPR team has been scanning additional areas identified through the stories and memories of shíshálh Survivors. . . .
“Survivors have carried these horrors, and the disappearances of their siblings, cousins, and peers, in addition to their own experiences,” said Joe, explaining Survivor accounts of children being led by staff into the forest in the middle of the night, never to return, and child witnesses who were punished for asking questions.
When Chief Joe’s heated rhetoric about stolen children and children being led into the forest at night never to return is put aside, what facts can be gleaned from the Band’s press release and video?
None.
There is no professional written report by Dr Clark showing how and where the 2025 GPR work was carried out, and where the 41 additional unmarked graves are located. And despite the claim that the GPR work was guided by the ‘stories and memories’ of Survivors who told of the horrors of the ‘disappearances of their siblings, cousins and peers’, not a single name of a sibling, cousin or peer is provided, nor a single detail of how and when these mysterious 81 children disappeared. Is it reasonable to credit Elders and Survivors who claim to recall precisely where their ‘siblings, cousins and peers’ were murdered and clandestinely buried, yet cannot even recall their names or the circumstances of their disappearance?
In the absence of any information from Chief Joe, whose 15 August 2025 press release requested ‘space and privacy’ for the Band, is it possible for Canadians to learn where Dr Clark ‘discovered’ his latest 41 burials?
In her letter to the Speaker of the BC Legislature, MLA Tara Armstrong raised the possibility that Dr Clark’s most recent GPR ‘discoveries’ are located in or near an existing graveyard:
Second, the Sechelt statements fail to clarify the exact location of the 41 anomalies, leaving it uncertain whether they lie in or near an existing graveyard. This distinction is critical: the presence of burials in or adjacent to a graveyard is not inherently surprising or suspicious. Over time wooden markers decay and precise grave locations are often lost from memory.
Oblique clues in the Band’s 15 August 2025 video suggest that Tara Armstrong’s instincts are accurate, and that all 41 burials ‘discovered’ by Dr Clark are unmarked graves in the Sechelt Band’s own neglected community cemetery. The attached screenshots from the Band’s 15 August 2025 video show:
An artist’s sketch of a GPR grid in a cemetery
A computer image of GPR results on a grid in a cemetery with areas highlighted in red, presumably to indicate burials
GPR team member Micaela Champagne standing in a cemetery with crosses visible in the background
A member of the team using a GPR machine in a cemetery, with crosses and the ocean faintly visible in the background
It appears the cemetery briefly glimpsed in these images in the Sechelt Band’s 15 August 2025 video is the old neglected cemetery on the Sechelt Reserve in which Band members were buried by their families. The cemetery, shown on the upper left in this Google Maps street view, is a considerable distance from the former St Augustine’s Indian Residential School, and overlooks the ocean, which agrees with the image in the Band’s 15 August 2025 video of a male member of the team using a GPR machine in an area with crosses and the ocean faintly visible in the background.
That the Sechelt Band would use GPR to map the unmarked graves in its own Band cemetery and imply to the world that the results indicate that crimes were committed is shocking, but not unprecedented. On 4 August 2025 the Penelakut Band did the same thing, announcing with great media fanfare that it had found 342 unmarked graves, whereas in reality UBC’s Dr Andrew Martindale had merely mapped 342 unmarked graves in the Band’s own community cemetery on the former Kuper Island.
It thus seems that the 41 children’s burials announced by the Sechelt Band on 15 August 2025 are merely 41 unmarked graves which Dr Terry Clark mapped using GPR in the Band’s old community cemetery on Sinku Drive.
Dr Clark also appears to have done GPR work in 2025 at three other locations. Sechelt residents recently observed GPR work being done at the site of a former Petro-Canada station on the reserve at 5570 Sunshine Coast Highway, and on the asphalt of the adjacent exit road from St Mary’s hospital (see areas outlined in red in the attached screenshot).
Using GPR on a paved road to search for burials is obviously problematic. Using GPR to search for burials at the site of the former Petro-Canada station is even more problematic since GPR can only locate soil disturbances, and the site (now a desolate moonscape) was excavated twice, once during the building of the Petro-Canada station and installation of the underground gas tanks, and again when the station was demolished and the gas tanks were removed and fill from elsewhere was trucked in and dumped on the property. It also seems strange that the Band would even want to use GPR to search for children’s burials at the site of the former Petro-Canada station as the Band has plans for a large development on the property, the Shishalh Centre, billed as a ‘master planned multi-purpose residential and commercial development in the highest population centre of the Sunshine Coast’. It would be extremely counterproductive for the Band to have to shut down a large development because Dr Terry Clark found 41 phantom children’s graves on the property, and consequently one has to wonder why Elders led Dr Clark to that already heavily-excavated site.
In addition to these locations, the Band’s 15 August 2025 video shows a GPR operator working next to what appears to be one of the buildings with green siding on the other side of the St Mary’s hospital exit road which appear to be part of the hospital property.
However despite the fact that GPR work was apparently done at these latter three adjacent sites, it is almost certain that nothing was found there, and that Dr Clark’s latest 41 burials can all be attributed to his mapping of 41 unmarked graves in the Sechelt Band’s neglected community cemetery on Sinku Drive.
Who is ultimately responsible for this fiasco?
Chief Lenora Joe attributes responsibility to Elders and Survivors since it was their tales which drove the GPR investigations:
These findings and the areas scanned were all driven by the stories and the memories of our survivors, our elders and family members who have been carrying these truths and burdens with strength for many, many years.
This raises a question underlying alleged ‘discoveries’ of unmarked graves at former residential school sites all across Canada: Should Canadians believe Elders and Survivors when they tell horror stories of murders, atrocities and clandestine burials? Are Elders and Survivors repositories of first-hand knowledge, or are they merely old people with faulty memories and over-active imaginations? Four years into Canada’s ghoulish quest in which millions of dollars of Canadian taxpayer funds have been spent by Indian Bands all over the country searching for unmarked graves at former Indian residential schools and not a single body has been found, the answer increasingly seems to be that Elders and Survivors are merely old people with faulty memories and over-active imaginations, and their horror stories of murders, atrocities and clandestine burials should be disregarded.
The responsibility for this fiasco lies instead with Band leaders and archaeologists; with the University of Manitoba, which refuse to release the TRC documents which establish that the TRC’s misleadingly-titled Missing Children Project found no missing Indian residential school children; with the federal government, which funds these macabre searches for unmarked graves (the Sechelt Band received $2,649,125.00 from the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund from 2023 to 2025); and with the BC government, which flew the Canadian flag at half-mast for three days without troubling to tell Canadians that it was flying the flag at half-mast for 81 phantom children who never existed.
(NOTE: The spelling of Indian names in the International Phonetic Alphabet has not been used above as Aboriginal people in what is now Canada had no written languages, and the recent adoption of the International Phonetic Alphabet to spell Indian words in Canada’s two official languages is a source of immense confusion).
