OP-ED: The Kamloops burial hoax continues to unravel

"A February 17 press release from B.C.’s Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation is as inconclusive as its May 27, 2021, media announcement that the remains of 215 missing children had been found."

The long shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School

Author: Hymie Rubenstein

A February 17 press release, portions of which are posted below, from B.C.’s Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation (legally the Kamloops Indian Band) is as inconclusive as its May 27, 2021, heartfelt and compelling media announcement that the remains of 215 missing children had been found close to the Band’s long shuttered Indian Residential School.

“Inconclusive” best describes the statement’s many undocumented assertions. Inconclusive also characterizes the prohibition of access to details about the Band’s investigation of this issue for at least the past five years.

Highly questionable also is the Band’s omission of the fact that nearly all Kamloops Indian Residential School students who died while registered at the school have been accounted for. Nor has the Band ever allowed those leading the investigation to be interviewed.

More important still, this recent press release is far more measured than the hysterical announcement in May 2021.

This softening partly explains the Band’s recent but unannounced removal from its website of the gruesome May 27, 2021 declaration that it had conclusively discovered the remains of 215 missing schoolchildren, a revelation it transformed two years later into sub-surface “anomalies,” namely soil disturbances of unknown origin or content.

Though removed, readers need to be reminded about the contents of the May 2021 press release heard around the world:

It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc Kukpi7 [Chief] Rosanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School…. “We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” stated Kukpi7 [Chief] Rosanne Casimir. “Some were as young as three years old. We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc is the final resting place of these children…. At this time we have more questions than answers. We look forward to providing updates as they become available.”

“More questions than answers” is an understatement because several curious academics, legal experts, and other observers soon raised questions about this ‘discovery.”

• How can an inconclusive technique like ground-penetrating radar (GPR) prove the existence of buried bodies when it cannot confirm the presence of organic material?

• How can ground-penetrating radar determine the exact age of children?

• Why has the Kamloops band (and many others like it) been pushing these inconclusive GPR “discoveries” as hard as they can? Could there be financial and other gains in doing so?

• Who possessed this “knowing in our community” except for non-community members like the thoroughly discredited conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett and a couple of homeless people he met on the streets of Vancouver?

• Were the murders of children claimed by Annett and others ever reported to the police? If so, what was the result?

• What is the content of the indigenous “knowing” in the Kamloops community, which individuals held this “knowing,” and how credible are their assertions?

• What are the names of the dead children, or even the name of a single missing child?

• Which parents or other relatives are still searching for the missing Kamloops IRS children?

• What is the proof that these deaths were undocumented?

• Why haven’t any substantial updates been presented since May 27, 2021?

• Most important of all, why have no excavations been undertaken to determine whether any human remains are contained in what are presumed to be unmarked graves, some even believed to contain murdered children, when the exhuming of buried remains has been encouraged, even demanded, by indigenous people and organizations in other cases, like the Winnipeg one, involving accusations of murder?

The Band’s February 17 update has only raised even more questions than answers because the Kamloops leadership has refused to present a full accounting of the material in their possession.

Nor has the Band acknowledged that although LiDAR scanning is more precise than GPR scanning, it cannot directly “see” remains in the ground, which require follow-up investigations by forensic teams.

Still, the press release confidently but vaguely said that:

• The radar and laser scanner ruled out the presence of utility lines and clay tiles in those locations.

• Signatures that resemble burials were found in some areas.

• Some areas were ruled out as burial sites, while others cannot be ruled out with confidence.

The absence of “clay tiles” is a direct challenge to the meticulous research of “Kam Res,” a Canadian professional architect with expertise in aerial imagery, photographs, and archival resources, which he skillfully applied to the Kamloops Indian Residential School “burial” site, offering a powerfully persuasive counter-argument to the one peddled by the Kamloops Band.

Also, no mention was made about whether the “detection dogs” had discovered signs of human remains.

The most telling statement of all is that the Band has not attempted to exhume the purported graves of the 215 children despite receiving $12.1 million in federal funding for field work and other research.

That admission comes ahead of the required release of Access To Information documents regarding the Band’s requests for funding for “exhumation of remains” based on a January 13 order by the federal Information Commissioner for the release of hundreds of pages of records sealed by the Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations regarding the 2021 funding for the exhumation of remains. “The department must respond to the request without delay,” wrote the Commissioner, who set a deadline of February 19 for the initial disclosure of documents.

The department attempted to seal all the Progress Reports as confidential when Blacklock’s Reporter requested the records. It also withheld emails between the First Nation and a federal manager who had repeatedly questioned what “archaeological and forensic work” was underway.

No parliamentary committee has investigated the Kamloops graves story to date. The Senate Indigenous Peoples Committee, in a 2024 report, Missing Children, Missing Records, acknowledged claims that as many as 4,100 children died in the Residential School system were never corroborated.

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.