Canada’s Kamloops Graves Scandal: The Fiction Continues

Four years ago, amid the run-up to the 2022 Winter Olympics, an Indigenous-led Canadian group announced it was seeking to bring the 2030 Olympic games to the province of British Columbia. One reason to support the project, the national CTV News network told readers, is that it would help heal the wounds caused by the claimed discovery of 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous students on the grounds of a former Kamloops, B.C. residential school in May 2021:

“With the recent confirmations of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites… many Canadians are only now confronting the ugly truth of the country’s past—and beginning to understand the important role reconciliation will play in its future,” wrote Vancouver-based CTV News reporter Ben Miljure. “A successful bid could bring those important issues onto the world stage.”

Naturally, a number of local officials lined up behind the Olympic bid. In the months following the dramatic unmarked-graves announcement, no one dared push back on any initiative, no matter how far-fetched, marketed as a recipe for reconciliation. The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation, on whose lands the graves were said to have been discovered, received more than CA$12 million in funding, much of which was supposed to go toward investigating the grave sites.

The on-reserve population of the reserve is only about 550, meaning that this amount would have been enough to pay literally the entire adult population of the reserve a respectable full-time salary for a period of several months, to help exhume the claimed graves—graves whose precise position had supposedly been determined using ground-penetrating radar (GPR). But the mathematics didn’t matter during the unmarked-graves social panic of 2021. Indeed, Justin Trudeau, then the Prime Minister, couldn’t shovel the money out of Ottawa fast enough. He quickly set out on a maudlin tour of Indigenous communities, buying heavily into the idea that 215 tiny Indigenous corpses truly had been found in Kamloops.

That was almost five years ago. An entire Winter Olympics cycle has elapsed since that above-referenced CTV News report. During that time, not a single grave—marked or unmarked—has been found at any of the 215 “soil anomalies” identified by the 2021 GPR survey.

It is theoretically possible that one or more graves could be there, much in the way that it is theoretically possible that secret graves (or treasure, or anything) could lie under this or that patch of land. But the fact that the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation, having received and spent its cash, has made no effort to investigate what lies beneath the earth’s surface, suggests that the only thing the GPR survey picked up was a set of old irrigation pipes or tree roots.

As I’ve written before, the whole saga has been a signature disgrace for the media, which bit hard on the “unmarked graves” narrative back in 2021, but then refused to correct the record when the story collapsed.

CTV News’ above-referenced false claim that there’d been “confirmation” of the 215 unmarked graves’ existence represents just one of thousands of similar lies that appeared in the Canadian media during this period. The narrative quickly took on the status of a sacred myth. And Indigenous academics, politicians, and journalists who opined on the issue were treated as unfalsifiable oracles. 

This included Miljure himself—who recounted his own reaction to the unmarked-graves announcement to CTV News viewers and readers. “The confirmation of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., was a gut punch to the country,” wrote his colleague Alexandra Mae Jones in a 29 September 2021 article about him. She continued:

For [Miljure], it pierced open what he had kept hidden from those outside his inner circle. He was recording a live stand-up in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery last May, in front of 215 tiny pairs of shoes, when his voice began to shake. He later wrote that the tragedy hit too close to home. ‘When the camera turned on and I opened my mouth to speak, I unexpectedly choked up, sobbing through my words as I struggled to maintain my composure,’ Miljure wrote.

Miljure is a fine reporter with a well-deserved reputation for fact-finding—which is why I’m using him as a case study: Pretty much every journalist in Canada (including me, I confess), even the good ones, bought into the unmarked-graves scandal in those first weeks and months. After all, lots of awful things happened at residential schools, where the treatment of Indigenous students could vary according to the temperament of the presiding priests, nuns, and ministers. No one in my industry seemed to understand the limitations of GPR technology, which doesn’t present technicians with an X-ray of everything that lies beneath the earth’s surface, skeletons and all (as credulous reporters seemed to imagine); but rather soil dislocations, which can be caused by a multitude of mundane artefacts, including rocks and former irrigation ditches.