The 215 Children’s Remains Found Claim: Was It a Hoax?
Memorial at former Kamloops Indian Residential School c. June 2021 (Credits: NPR.org).
This past National Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada, Mi’kmaq lawyer and activist Pam Palmater featured ‘settler academic’ Dr. Sean Carleton on her Warrior Life Podcast. The topic was “Combatting Residential School Denialism,” a subject Carleton has been devoting a lot of attention to since the world was told that 215 children’s remains had been discovered in an old orchard near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS).
Drawing upon a paper he co-authored earlier, Carleton talked at length about the ‘mass grave hoax conspiracy theory’, a supposed right wing scheme to discredit the claim of 215 children’s remains being found as a hoax because some headlines incorrectly stated that a mass grave had been found.
Having once tweeted his own belief that a mass grave had been discovered at KIRS, Carleton awkwardly confessed that he, too, mistook the initial report as a mass grave having been found because he says he didn’t really understand what is a mass grave.
In the podcast, Carleton pointed out that: “93.5% of articles (containing inaccuracies) released in the spring, summer, and fall of 2021 did not report the KIRS findings as being a ‘mass grave.’” Carleton and his co-author, Reid Gerbrandt, only studied Canadian headlines, though, and the news of a mass grave of Indigenous school children being discovered became an international headline. On May 28, 2021, for example, the New York Times ran the online headline, “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” Carleton argued that ‘denialists’ capitalized on the few erroneous headlines to discount the discovery as a hoax.
What Carleton omitted both in his paper and the podcast was the mention of ‘mass grave’ in an Assembly of First Nations resolution weeks after the initial May 27, 2021 announcement by the same Chief Rosanne Casimir who reported the discovery, and the reference to ‘mass grave’ in a complaint filed with the International Criminal Court by a group of lawyers on June 3, 2021.
The resolution clearly supposes there is more than just one mass grave.
In the official press statement made by Tk’emlups te Swepemec on May 27, 2021, there is no mention of a mass grave having been found. The claim of discovering 215 children’s remains was based on a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey that detected 215 soil disturbances, which is all GPR does: GPR can’t identify what caused those disturbances. Tk’emlups apparently chose to determine those disturbances were dead children missing from KIRS based, not on any documentary evidence of unresolved missing child reports, but on the ‘knowing’ of community members. Stories of mysteriously missing residential school students circulated for years at Tk’emlups and other reserves.
Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Chief Rosanne Casimir (Credits: CTVnews.ca).
While Tk’emlups initially reported the discovery as positive evidence of children’s remains, the First Nation has since walked back that claim to simply say that 215 “anomalies” had been detected by GPR. However, the popularity of the belief that children’s remains had indeed been found has become a factor in Tk’emlups’ media communication. A subsequent correction of the 215 number to 200 shortly after the May 27 announcement was set aside in the recent Tk’emlups revision because the ‘215’ number had become a potent symbol in activist circles. Effect rather than accuracy prevailed.
Firing for effect accounts for a lot of how the discovery of children remains was presented both to the media and the ICC.
ICC complaint; (“GOC:” Government of Canada).
For decades now, a faction of the aboriginal special interest lobby has tried to condemn Canada as a genocidal state. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) disappointed this faction by declaring that the Indian Residential Schools were just a “cultural genocide.” The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry tried to accuse Canada of committing an “ongoing genocide” but the fact of actual convictions of individuals, predominantly Indigenous, undermined the rhetorical gambit.
“Genocide in Canada: A Legal Definition;” published by Native Women’s Associciation of Canada.
The prospect of actually discovering scores of dead children in secret graves at former residential schools tantalized many activists hoping for the paramount moral leverage of genocidal victimhood. As Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray declared to the Senate Committee on Indigenous People in 2023, “We have said in this country, over and over, it was genocide. It was genocide.”
Finally, in an old orchard by a former residential school, there appeared to be genuine proof of Canada’s colonial genocide against Indigenous children: on May 27, 2021, Tk’emlups te Swepemc announced that it had discovered 215 children’s remains.
We now know that no remains were actually found and it is unlikely that any will be found. There aren’t any names for any of these missing children; there are no parents wondering what happened to their children who mysteriously disappeared from school.
Ironically, it was the specter of a mass grave having been found that put the lie to the whole claim.
The Timeline
During the May long weekend in 2021, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu conducted a GPR survey of the old KIRS orchard and now heritage park (its operation has since been suspended). On May 24 Beaulieu presented her findings to Tk’emlups in an oral report. We do not know what Beaulieu actually reported to the chief and council but, at a minimum, it was that she had found 215 soil disturbances. A wish to confirm local Tk’emlups lore apparently led to the conclusion by Tk’emlups that these soil disturbances must be clandestine burials of students.
Dr. Sarah Beaulieu speaking (Credits: sightmagazine.com.au).
On May 25, Racelle Kooy, on behalf of Tk’emlups, contacted a few journalists, including Tanya Talaga, and presented Tk’emlups’ pending press statement concerning the discovery of 215 children’s remains. We do not know if the copy of the Tk’emlups statement that Kooy sent out matched what was officially announced on May 27 but from what Talaga mentions in her book, The Knowing, there doesn’t appear to be any deviation from the public statement and the select journalists were not told of a mass grave.
On May 26, Tk’emlups te Swepemc contacted the Tk’emlups RCMP detachment. We do not know exactly what Tk’emlups reported to the RCMP but it must have at least been the news that they had discovered evidence of 215 children’s remains on their reserve. The RCMP opened a file on May 26 and because it remains open to this day, the RCMP cannot disclose any information regarding the details of what they were told and what they said to Tk’emlups officials.
However, logical inference can supply a good picture of how the RCMP responded to the report. If the RCMP had been told that a mass grave had been found, the RCMP would have pointed out that 215 separate graves are not a mass grave. Presumably, the RCMP attended the nearby orchard on May 26 and would have quickly realized that there was no forensic evidence of any graves or human remains nor any documentary evidence of any missing children. The RCMP were not presented with any evidence to indicate any criminal acts had been committed, including unlawful burial, and in a May 28 statement, the Tk’emlups detachment announced that it will be “following (the band’s) lead on the release of information at this time.” The RCMP has no grounds to pursue the matter as a criminal investigation and given what little evidence they have – highly dubious GPR results and hearsay – they would be unable to obtain a warrant to conduct excavations and possible exhumations.
By late June 2021, the Tk’emlups RCMP detachment was still being barraged with numerous media requests for more information on the discovery and s/Sgt. Bill Wallace Issued the following statement:
“The Tk’emlúps Rural RCMP has attended the site, participated in meetings, and will continue working closely with the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc community leaders in determining the next steps and the best way to be involved in any investigative avenues explored going forward, while at the same time being supportive, respectful, and culturally sensitive to the indigenous communities that are impacted. Following a meeting with Band officials on May 31, the RCMP confirmed that the Band remains as the lead Official at this time, and that the RCMP will continue to support the Band in determining next steps. A file has been opened and any further actions will be taken in consultation with the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nations.”
The question of what lies beneath the ground at KIRS was officially a civilian matter until material evidence appeared to warrant criminal investigation.
It isn’t clear if the RCMP were informed by Tk’emlups te Swepemc on May 26 that they were planning a press release for the following day and the RCMP appear to have been excluded from seeing the press statement in advance. If the RCMP had had prior knowledge of the planned press release, it is likely that they would have discouraged Chief Casimir from stating: “… the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students at Kamloops Indian Residential School.” The RCMP were never presented with any evidence that would constitute a confirmation of 215 children`s remains being found.
Nevertheless, after Tk’emlups’ sensational May 27 announcement, the RCMP continued to have meetings with Tk’emlups and to interview persons involved with the alleged discovery. The RCMP contacted Dr. Sarah Beaulieu shortly after May 27 and probably sought to understand what Beaulieu told the band and what might make anyone think the soil disturbances could be clandestine burials. This contact evidently tripped some alarms, most notably for Talaga who was now in Kamloops.
Talaga recalls her editor apologetically informing her that: “The Prime Minister’s Office, the RCMP, is questioning the numbers – the 215.” Surprisingly, given that Talaga was privy to what was – and wasn’t – on the ground at KIRS at the time, Talaga assured her editor, “The number was correct.”
In The Knowing, Talaga claims (Pp. 32-3) to have phoned the late Murray Sinclair who then tells the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs on June 3:
“We need to have a discussion with the police about how they’re handling it, because they should not be pursuing those who are revealing the information. They should, in fact, be looking at and looking for those records. They should be looking at what we know as opposed to trying to pursue witnesses.The young lady who did the research on the ground-penetrating radar, for example, is quite scared of the approach that the RCMP have taken with her, and I don’t blame her. My advice to her—and others—has been to make sure she has legal counsel available to her so that she is not mistreated going forward.”
Within days of her May 27 announcement, Chief Casimir informed the public that a written report of Beaulieu’s findings would be made available to all. A written report appears to have been reviewed by 5 archaeologists in 2021 but it remains apocryphal since it hasn’t been made public. It isn’t known if the RCMP were provided with a copy of the written report but if they were, they still didn’t find any grounds to open a criminal investigation of the KIRS site.
On June 4, Chief Casimir clarified that a mass grave had not been found: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.”
The ICC Complaint
The RCMP were evidently unaware that while they were investigating the 215 children’s remains claim, a group of lawyers were preparing a complaint to the ICC that implicated the RCMP in the alleged concealment of children’s deaths. Acting as the coalition’s lead counsel, Brendan Myers Miller LL.M, wrote in a newsletter: “(t)he recent unearthing of amass (sic) unmarked grave of 215 Aboriginal children who were under the forced care of the Government of Canada and the Vatican” warranted involving the ICC to investigate what Canada wasn’t investigating since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) first sought the “truth of these deaths of Aboriginal children in care at residential schools.”
The lawyers made an extraordinary presumption of evidence that would typically suggest the commission of a genocidal act: “As would be the case anywhere in the world, this mass grave, and the deaths and general treatment of those children while in care of the federal government and the Vatican, is evidence of crimes against humanity.”
Except these lawyers knew or should have known that there was no evidence of a mass grave and that even if they supposed 215 GPR detections constituted forensic evidence of homicides, this tacitly meant numerous single graves and not one mass grave.
Because the Rome Statute prohibits prosecuting anyone for acts committed prior to July 1, 2002 and KIRS closed long before that date, the lawyers could not pursue an ICC investigation for genocide. Instead, the lawyers accused Canada, the Vatican, and their agents of committing a crime against humanity by endeavouring to conceal the deaths and mass grave. The ongoing concealment supposedly causes such anguish and harm to the Indigenous community as to constitute a crime against humanity. The ICC complaint was signed by a total of 15 lawyers on June 2, filed the following day and received by the ICC on June 7, 2021.
In September 2022, the ICC discreetly announced that it had rejected the complaint on the grounds that it did not have jurisdiction. Speaking to the inaugural National Gathering on Unmarked Burials hosted by Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray, former ICC president and judge, Dr. Chile Eboe-Osuji told the audience, “There is no pathway to the International Criminal Court for the situation of the historical Indian residential school system in Canada.”
Dr. Eboe-Osuji, 4th President, International Criminal Court.
The ICC complaint mentions two Tk’emlups members who were interviewed by media on May 28 which would suggest that the complaint was drafted on or after that date. Headlines about a mass grave began circulating on the same day. Either the lawyers read articles such as the one that appeared in the NYT and took it as true or they were told about a mass grave prior to the drafting of the Tk’emlups May 27 press release. That is, the lawyers were told of a mass grave before May 25 when the press statement is presented to a select audience of journalists, if that early version of the press statement did not include any reference to a mass grave. This would mean that the ICC complaint was being drafted soon after Beaulieu notified Tk’emlups of her GPR results and the lawyers were not aware of what would be said – and not said – in the official press statement.
It isn’t clear what led Ian Austen, the author of the NYT article, to conclude that a mass grave had been found. Presumably, whatever basis Austen had for making that statement passed muster with his editor. There was a failure to verify the Tk’emlups claim on the part of many news agencies. However, it is extraordinary for lawyers to positively state the existence of human remains and a mass grave without empirical proof which makes it seems likely that the lawyers had been in contact with someone involved with Tk’emlups prior to May 25 who told them that a mass grave of children had been found at KIRS because few people were aware of what Beaulieu’s GPR survey had found, which had only been reported to Tk’emlups on May 24.
The lawyers didn’t wait for verification of either the existence of any mass grave or children’s remains and their suspicion that more mass graves were likely to be found suggests prejudice on their part. As Miller mentions in his newsletter, the belief of missing children in unmarked burials at former Indian Residential Schools was a carry-over from the TRC. Believing a mass grave exists bolsters the wish to indict Canada on genocide.
Meme found on Facebook.
Assuming that any competent lawyer would be wary of perjuring themselves, the lawyers were apparently convinced that material evidence existed of children remains in a mass grave for them to commit to stating the deaths and mass grave as a fact. If they were erroneously notified of the discovery of human remains in a mass grave at KIRS as early as May 24, they were apparently informed of such in a manner that convinced them that incontrovertible forensic evidence was imminent.
This ICC complaint relied on two elements for it to have had a chance of being investigated by the ICC: the existence of children’s remains and the intent and effort to conceal their supposed mass grave. The fact that Sinclair presented the RCMP’s interview with Beaulieu as persecuting a witness plays into the objective of showing that the RCMP, as agents of the GoC, were attempting to conceal the deaths. Bear in mind that the late Murray Sinclair controverted the TRC’s figure of 3,201 student deaths by suggesting, after May 27, that as many as 15-25,000 or more children could be missing from the residential schools. Sinclair never publicly explained how he arrived at that significantly higher number.
It was the specter of children murdered en masse that kept the ICC complaint alive in ghoulish service to an ulterior agenda. Deferring any excavation of the KIRS site kept the possibility of finding children’s bodies plausible. After the ICC rejects the lawyers’ complaint, continuing to defer any excavations evades exposure of the fraud.
Conclusion
Since the May 27, 2021 announcement, some of the main actors have been playing a double-game of cautioning against jumping to conclusions while at the same time speaking as if firmly landed on a clandestine graveyard.
For instance, during Dr. Beaulieu’s July 15, 2021 presentation where she publicly adjusted the 215 figure to 200, Beaulieu stressed that while the soil disturbances are “probable burials,” they need to treat those sites as probable “until one excavates.” Beaulieu then added, “This is a long process that will take significant time and resources. They were children, robbed of their families and their childhood.” Beaulieu stated that despite knowing that 15 of those probable burials were ruled out by excavations previously undertaken by Simon Fraser University archaeologists who did not find any human remains. The earlier digs provide an archaeological sample indicating the probable absence of any human remains in the disputed site.
“All residential school landscapes are likely to contain burials and missing children and remote sensing such as GPR merely provides some spatial specificity to this truth,” said Beaulieu. Because the RCMP file remains open and Tk’emlups controls Beaulieu’s oral and written reports, we do not know what makes Beaulieu so sure that there are any dead children in the orchard. It isn’t clear if Beaulieu is under a non-disclosure agreement with Tk’emlups but she has since refused to respond to any journalist inquiries.
If Dr. Carleton says the report of mass graves is false, it’s news to Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray who recently appeared in another Warrior Life Podcast and repeatedly told Palmater’s audience that mass graves of missing children exist all over Canada and that these children need to be identified and returned to their families if possible. A year and half earlier, Murray was telling the Senate Committee on Indigenous People: “There are no missing children; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because parents were never told where they’re buried.”
The wish to believe that priests and nuns operated a veritable death camp under the pretenses of a boarding school is an outgrowth of the festering arch cynicism engendered by postmodernism. Deferential to the point of contempt, the federal government has let Tk’emlups carry on as Tk’emlups sees fit. This led to the passing of a motion to declare that Indian Residential Schools were a genocide and the same author of that motion, Leah Gazan (NDP MP Winnipeg-Centre), now wants to outlaw even asking if it really was a genocide. September 30th became a federal statutory holiday in 2021 (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation) and is becoming a statutory holiday for many provinces.
NDP MP Leah Gazan (Credits: Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press).
Tk’emlups received $8,000,000 of the $321M the Trudeau government promised for First Nations to conduct searches for bodies. Nowhere have any mystery bodies been found and it is very unlikely that any will be found because there aren’t any missing children as the Special Interlocutor told the Senate Committee. This morbid pantomime of recrimination and indignation shows no sign of ending any time soon although there is an increasingly skeptical public
Chief Casimir now refers to the 215 children’s remains as “anomalies” which is all they ever were in reality and she’s still not committing to any excavation to determine what the anomalies are one way or another. It is very likely that the anomalies are remnants of a septic field built on the site in 1924. Canadians continue to be held hostage to a blood libel of ghastly genocide because no one in authority dares infringe upon the sanctimony of First Nations victimhood no matter how incredible or false it gets.
Perhaps there were actors in the initial days that really believed that they had found scores of murdered children in an old apple orchard but when Chief Casimir presents her AFN resolution in early July 2021, she knows that no dead children were found there, much less a mass grave. The accusations that Casimir makes in her AFN motion echo the same accusations that the 15 lawyers make in their ICC complaint and it would seem that, at this point, preserving the chances of the ICC complaint is driving Casimir’s actions. The lawyers’ ICC complaint didn’t receive much press coverage when it was filed and negligible coverage when the ICC rejected it.
The moment when Casimir presents her AFN motion and states that a mass grave has been found is when the 215 children’s remains claim becomes a hoax. Whether the lawyers are victims of the con or co-perpetrators remains to be determined but the lawyers should have known better than to presume the evidence existed before knowing it to exist.
The RCMP file remains open because they can’t rule out the possibility of bodies being found until thorough excavations are conducted. A terrible wave of vandalism, statue toppling and church burning was let loose in the wake of the Tk’emlups claim and it continues to this day. This was a hoax that became a national myth of negative heritage with children now being regularly schooled in the belief that Canada killed First Nations children. It is a despicable manipulation of innocence and credulity.
So far none of the Members of Parliament who voted unanimously for Gazan’s genocide motion have since recanted their support. Having presumed Canada’s and the churches’ guilt, those same MPs are now being presented with a bill that would stifle what meager appeal could be offered by citizens in the court of public opinion.
The worst of all crimes is receiving the least of due process. In the Senate, Murray asserted, “If the International Criminal Court isn’t going to take steps to hold the state accountable, then absolutely, we need to find another mechanism.” In her recent appearance on Warrior Life Podcast and in her several reports as the Special Interlocutor, Murray has stressed that she will be seeking jurisdiction and reparations.
Aiding and abetting Murray’s efforts to find another mechanism to prosecute Canada for residential school genocide, an international tribunal will be coming to Canada in 2026 at the request of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. “Asking them whether Canada committed crimes against humanity and genocide and getting their answers I think is going to be very important to survivors and and communities because they’ve been talking about how there’s been no justice and no accountability,” said Murray.
Credit: Warrior Life Podcast.
As the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burials Associated with Indian Residential Schools, Kimberly Murray recently released her Final Report. In addition to an Indigenous-led Repartaions Framework for “genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass human rights violations,” Murray lists 42 obligations that Canada must fulfill to address the “historical and ongoing genocide.” Murray also calls for the federal government to create an Indigenous-led national commission with a 20-year mandate to investigate missing and disappeared children while at the same time insisting that Canada refer itself to the ICC for investigation into crimes against humanity.
A direct beneficiary of the 215 children’s remains claim, Murray is singular in the amount of opportunities she envisions being further mined from abandoned and apocryphal residential school graveyards.
Long before the federal government agrees to pay reparations for phantom deaths at former Indian Residential Schools, it should convene a Royal Commission to establish who knew what and when about the alleged discovery of 215 children’s remains. Were the lawyers who complained to the ICC simply taken in by someone else’s rash and premature conclusions about what GPR had detected? Were the lawyers succumbing to confirmation bias? Or, were they like Murray, hoping to exploit fake news for personal and professional enrichment?
