The search for Canada's “missing” indigenous residential school children began in 1974 at Saskatchewan's Battleford Industrial School, a facility with a cemetery near the school..Its 1974 excavation revealed 72 people were buried in the graveyard, mainly school students and church personnel..This revelation provoked no accusations by indigenous people of abused or murdered children buried in unmarked graves..This may be partly because of the graveyard's known existence even though, like most other burying grounds associated with residential schools, it was long abandoned to the elements and never listed as a registered cemetery in surviving documents..Unlike Battleford, the locations of many dedicated burial sites of residential school children have been lost. Responding to this, one of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) "calls to action" was "the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried.".There is no reason to take issue with this recommendation. But proving the existence of undocumented school cemeteries or other burying sites has become a highly politicized nightmare compounded by intense sorrow and recrimination..This is best seen in the case of the May 27, 2021, Tk'emlúps te Secwé pemc (Kamloops) Band’s painfully shocking press release stating: "This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) 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.".Regardless of the intense grief and anger the announcement produced, it remains highly questionable given that GPR can't verify the existence of organic material..Like the Battleford case, the alleged remains were found near the former Kamloops IRS. But unlike the Battleford case, no attempt was made to excavate the site to validate the band's "confirmation" or the associated beliefs that the allegedly buried children may have been murder victims..This did not deter the federal government from quickly allocating $321 million to fulfilling the TRC's call to action, a decision which resulted in an explosion of copycat searches..Paralleling other historical examples of mass psychosis, the two latest discoveries, revealed four days apart, are classic examples of history repeating itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce..The first of these farces was revealed in a Thursday, January 12 video featuring Michael Starr, chief of Saskatchewan's Star Blanket Cree Reserve No. 83 located 70-km northeast of Regina, and other officials who made several accusations easily disputed on historical, logical, and factual grounds..Starr said the search team employed GPR beginning November 2021 to examine more than 55 acres near the remains of the former Lebret Indian Residential School (IRS) — still often referred to as Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School — Canada's longest running indigenous boarding school (1884-1998)..The result was the discovery of more than 2,000 subterranean "anomalies.".Chief Starr also revealed the search team will employ GPR to search other reserve areas, a task that would take three years to complete given its nearly 14,000-acre size..Starr nevertheless neglected to tell his viewers the reserve's community cemetery was where its dead IRS students and some from some distant communities were buried, a fact revealed in a TRC commissioned study..According to the team's director of operations, Sheldon Poitras, the search also discovered human remains — consisting of a jawbone fragment of a child aged four to six — near the former boarding school last October..Its significance has been carefully challenged on this news site by distinguished scholar Tom Flanagan..While the search continues, band officials said they will deploy cutting-edge but minimally invasive DNA identification techniques to determine the contents of the soil irregularities..Though the Star Blanket's DNA plan should be a welcome model for the other communities that have reported unmarked graves across the country, it begs the question of why all have so far eschewed such investigative efforts..As for the possible content of these GPR "hits," Starr vaguely said, "… we were aware of the things that were happening in the past …. We didn't know exactly what was happening. But we knew something happened …. It was sad. It was hurtful. And it made us very angry.".Starr also said there are stories of "dungeons" that students were taken to and hidden passages "for them to do what they did and take some of our people to different areas.".He also argued, "We don't want anything … We want to honour the remains of this young child [whose jawbone fragment was found].".This admission did not prevent Saskatchewan's Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) Chief Bobby Cameron, whose FSIN funded the Star Blanket's GPR search, from complaining that if the government is committed to helping, it "can start by building healing and wellness centres," a clue to the reparations-seeking agenda underlying this burial hunt..As for the 2,000 GPR "hits," to their credit band officials did not claim they necessarily represented the presence of human remains..According to Chief Starr, "Does that mean there's 2,000 unmarked graves? We don't think so. Because there's anomalies … GPR can't definitively say … It could be a stone and it can be a combo of gravel. It could be a piece of wood, or it could actually be something. We don't know yet. All we know is that there's over 2,000 of them.".Eager to engage in gratuitous virtue signalling, this did not deter the University of Saskatchewan from issuing a distorted statement about the find: "… it stands with Star Blanket Cree Nation following the discovery of … many [sic] potential unmarked graves at the site of the former Qu'Appelle Indian Industrial School near Lebret, Saskatchewan.".There are other grounds to question the GPR results as well..Traditionally, the Cree peoples of the Prairies were roaming hunters and gatherers who ceremoniously buried their dead in small shallow graves wherever they were temporarily encamped. Early European explorers, hunters, trappers, traders, and farmers caught in isolated areas saw the same fate. There is hardly anywhere on the prairies, not to mention the rest of Canada, where you could put a spade in the ground without unearthing human bones. Enclosed reserve cemeteries were mainly established after the bison were decimated during the last third of the 19th century, the same time the land treaties establishing indigenous reserves were signed..Today, these mostly unkempt indigenous graveyards are full of unmarked graves. Still, it's inconceivable that 100 IRS children, let alone 2,000, from the 14 neighbouring reserves that make up the entire Star Blanket Band, lie buried in these 55 acres without having provoked a huge outcry while the school was still operating. Moreover, if any of the 2,000 GPR "hits" show the remains of indigenous people, these could well have preceded the establishment of the first incarnation of the Lebret boarding school in 1884..That no lost IRS children are likely buried in the 55 acres finds support in the successor to the TRC. Canada's National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation's (NCTR) Memorial Register contains a list of Lebret IRS students who died as registered school students or within a year of their discharge whose cause of death, place of death, and interment location are unknown..The date of demise of 16 of the 55 listed students is unknown though it is probable they died during the early years of the school's operation when death rates from infectious diseases were at their apex. An additional 24 "missing students," as they are always called, died before 1900. Overall, 40 students representing 73% of so-called missing students likely died more than 122 years ago, most of them from contagious diseases like influenza, measles and tuberculosis, afflictions over which indigenous people had little natural resistance..There is no evidence any were not returned to their families for burial or that some criminal act resulted in their unfortunate demise..In short, none of these 55 students are missing except in a technical sense because no relatives are looking for them and because all can be found buried deeply in archives never consulted or carefully hidden from the public by the NCTR..It is even easier to debunk the second farcical GPR "discovery" announced on Monday, January 17 by the Wauzhushk Onigum indigenous reserve of more than 170 subsurface anomalies in a search for unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Kenora, ON..Funded by the federal government to the tune of nearly $3 million, the search began last May. Unlike the Star Blanket case, the anomalies were referred to as "plausible burials," a plausible assertion because they were found in the well-known but neglected cemetery close to the reserve’s former St. Mary's Indian Residential School..That some of these anomalies may be signs of the remains of the school's students is also plausible because it is well-known that students who died from epidemic diseases while attending school were often buried on-site rather than returned to their families. With budgets perpetually strained in the late 1800s and early 1900s — and given the lack of refrigeration and rapid transport — it was often impractical to send the bodies back home if the deceased child's reserve was far from the school. Instead, local churches took on the responsibility to bury the local dead from indigent families, as a TRC report indicates. This same policy also applied to European school personnel, including its clergy..Local burial was also a public health necessity during epidemics to prevent further contagion..This means students from distant reserves attending the school would have made up most of the pupils buried there. But this never stopped local band leaders and families from ensuring that the cemetery was acknowledged correctly and maintained properly, minimally by replacing their decayed wooden crosses, something that was almost never done..That said, school burials were the exception rather than the rule because most student deaths did not occur at residential schools. They happened in hospitals where the children were under the care of qualified physicians, or in accidents or from disease on the children’s home reserves. These death records also establish that for the most part the children were buried on their home reserves, and in many cases their parents signed their death certificates..None of these facts deterred Wayne Mason, executive director of Winnipeg's Wa-Say Healing Centre, which provides health and wellness support to residential school survivors and their families, a man born on the reserve, from playing the now common but reprehensible genocide denial-cum-envy card by opining: "When we think about the Holocaust, and the perpetrators were being charged, and they're still going to court even after they were old ... some of these people that are still alive today that were perpetrators of the residential school killings should be charged…. Finding the truth and exercising caution on everything touched by this genocidal legacy comes at a price, and it's a price our Treaty partners need to be prepared to pay. That is true reconciliation.".That price is always more financial and other reparations..Still, so long as the federal dollars keep flowing, this boondoggle of a scavenger hunt for imaginary missing children buried in unmarked graves will never be turned off, even though there is no credible evidence of a single child murdered while attending any of Canada's Indian Residential Schools..Hymie Rubenstein is the editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba
The search for Canada's “missing” indigenous residential school children began in 1974 at Saskatchewan's Battleford Industrial School, a facility with a cemetery near the school..Its 1974 excavation revealed 72 people were buried in the graveyard, mainly school students and church personnel..This revelation provoked no accusations by indigenous people of abused or murdered children buried in unmarked graves..This may be partly because of the graveyard's known existence even though, like most other burying grounds associated with residential schools, it was long abandoned to the elements and never listed as a registered cemetery in surviving documents..Unlike Battleford, the locations of many dedicated burial sites of residential school children have been lost. Responding to this, one of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) "calls to action" was "the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried.".There is no reason to take issue with this recommendation. But proving the existence of undocumented school cemeteries or other burying sites has become a highly politicized nightmare compounded by intense sorrow and recrimination..This is best seen in the case of the May 27, 2021, Tk'emlúps te Secwé pemc (Kamloops) Band’s painfully shocking press release stating: "This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar (GPR) 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.".Regardless of the intense grief and anger the announcement produced, it remains highly questionable given that GPR can't verify the existence of organic material..Like the Battleford case, the alleged remains were found near the former Kamloops IRS. But unlike the Battleford case, no attempt was made to excavate the site to validate the band's "confirmation" or the associated beliefs that the allegedly buried children may have been murder victims..This did not deter the federal government from quickly allocating $321 million to fulfilling the TRC's call to action, a decision which resulted in an explosion of copycat searches..Paralleling other historical examples of mass psychosis, the two latest discoveries, revealed four days apart, are classic examples of history repeating itself, first as a tragedy, then as a farce..The first of these farces was revealed in a Thursday, January 12 video featuring Michael Starr, chief of Saskatchewan's Star Blanket Cree Reserve No. 83 located 70-km northeast of Regina, and other officials who made several accusations easily disputed on historical, logical, and factual grounds..Starr said the search team employed GPR beginning November 2021 to examine more than 55 acres near the remains of the former Lebret Indian Residential School (IRS) — still often referred to as Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School — Canada's longest running indigenous boarding school (1884-1998)..The result was the discovery of more than 2,000 subterranean "anomalies.".Chief Starr also revealed the search team will employ GPR to search other reserve areas, a task that would take three years to complete given its nearly 14,000-acre size..Starr nevertheless neglected to tell his viewers the reserve's community cemetery was where its dead IRS students and some from some distant communities were buried, a fact revealed in a TRC commissioned study..According to the team's director of operations, Sheldon Poitras, the search also discovered human remains — consisting of a jawbone fragment of a child aged four to six — near the former boarding school last October..Its significance has been carefully challenged on this news site by distinguished scholar Tom Flanagan..While the search continues, band officials said they will deploy cutting-edge but minimally invasive DNA identification techniques to determine the contents of the soil irregularities..Though the Star Blanket's DNA plan should be a welcome model for the other communities that have reported unmarked graves across the country, it begs the question of why all have so far eschewed such investigative efforts..As for the possible content of these GPR "hits," Starr vaguely said, "… we were aware of the things that were happening in the past …. We didn't know exactly what was happening. But we knew something happened …. It was sad. It was hurtful. And it made us very angry.".Starr also said there are stories of "dungeons" that students were taken to and hidden passages "for them to do what they did and take some of our people to different areas.".He also argued, "We don't want anything … We want to honour the remains of this young child [whose jawbone fragment was found].".This admission did not prevent Saskatchewan's Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) Chief Bobby Cameron, whose FSIN funded the Star Blanket's GPR search, from complaining that if the government is committed to helping, it "can start by building healing and wellness centres," a clue to the reparations-seeking agenda underlying this burial hunt..As for the 2,000 GPR "hits," to their credit band officials did not claim they necessarily represented the presence of human remains..According to Chief Starr, "Does that mean there's 2,000 unmarked graves? We don't think so. Because there's anomalies … GPR can't definitively say … It could be a stone and it can be a combo of gravel. It could be a piece of wood, or it could actually be something. We don't know yet. All we know is that there's over 2,000 of them.".Eager to engage in gratuitous virtue signalling, this did not deter the University of Saskatchewan from issuing a distorted statement about the find: "… it stands with Star Blanket Cree Nation following the discovery of … many [sic] potential unmarked graves at the site of the former Qu'Appelle Indian Industrial School near Lebret, Saskatchewan.".There are other grounds to question the GPR results as well..Traditionally, the Cree peoples of the Prairies were roaming hunters and gatherers who ceremoniously buried their dead in small shallow graves wherever they were temporarily encamped. Early European explorers, hunters, trappers, traders, and farmers caught in isolated areas saw the same fate. There is hardly anywhere on the prairies, not to mention the rest of Canada, where you could put a spade in the ground without unearthing human bones. Enclosed reserve cemeteries were mainly established after the bison were decimated during the last third of the 19th century, the same time the land treaties establishing indigenous reserves were signed..Today, these mostly unkempt indigenous graveyards are full of unmarked graves. Still, it's inconceivable that 100 IRS children, let alone 2,000, from the 14 neighbouring reserves that make up the entire Star Blanket Band, lie buried in these 55 acres without having provoked a huge outcry while the school was still operating. Moreover, if any of the 2,000 GPR "hits" show the remains of indigenous people, these could well have preceded the establishment of the first incarnation of the Lebret boarding school in 1884..That no lost IRS children are likely buried in the 55 acres finds support in the successor to the TRC. Canada's National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation's (NCTR) Memorial Register contains a list of Lebret IRS students who died as registered school students or within a year of their discharge whose cause of death, place of death, and interment location are unknown..The date of demise of 16 of the 55 listed students is unknown though it is probable they died during the early years of the school's operation when death rates from infectious diseases were at their apex. An additional 24 "missing students," as they are always called, died before 1900. Overall, 40 students representing 73% of so-called missing students likely died more than 122 years ago, most of them from contagious diseases like influenza, measles and tuberculosis, afflictions over which indigenous people had little natural resistance..There is no evidence any were not returned to their families for burial or that some criminal act resulted in their unfortunate demise..In short, none of these 55 students are missing except in a technical sense because no relatives are looking for them and because all can be found buried deeply in archives never consulted or carefully hidden from the public by the NCTR..It is even easier to debunk the second farcical GPR "discovery" announced on Monday, January 17 by the Wauzhushk Onigum indigenous reserve of more than 170 subsurface anomalies in a search for unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Kenora, ON..Funded by the federal government to the tune of nearly $3 million, the search began last May. Unlike the Star Blanket case, the anomalies were referred to as "plausible burials," a plausible assertion because they were found in the well-known but neglected cemetery close to the reserve’s former St. Mary's Indian Residential School..That some of these anomalies may be signs of the remains of the school's students is also plausible because it is well-known that students who died from epidemic diseases while attending school were often buried on-site rather than returned to their families. With budgets perpetually strained in the late 1800s and early 1900s — and given the lack of refrigeration and rapid transport — it was often impractical to send the bodies back home if the deceased child's reserve was far from the school. Instead, local churches took on the responsibility to bury the local dead from indigent families, as a TRC report indicates. This same policy also applied to European school personnel, including its clergy..Local burial was also a public health necessity during epidemics to prevent further contagion..This means students from distant reserves attending the school would have made up most of the pupils buried there. But this never stopped local band leaders and families from ensuring that the cemetery was acknowledged correctly and maintained properly, minimally by replacing their decayed wooden crosses, something that was almost never done..That said, school burials were the exception rather than the rule because most student deaths did not occur at residential schools. They happened in hospitals where the children were under the care of qualified physicians, or in accidents or from disease on the children’s home reserves. These death records also establish that for the most part the children were buried on their home reserves, and in many cases their parents signed their death certificates..None of these facts deterred Wayne Mason, executive director of Winnipeg's Wa-Say Healing Centre, which provides health and wellness support to residential school survivors and their families, a man born on the reserve, from playing the now common but reprehensible genocide denial-cum-envy card by opining: "When we think about the Holocaust, and the perpetrators were being charged, and they're still going to court even after they were old ... some of these people that are still alive today that were perpetrators of the residential school killings should be charged…. Finding the truth and exercising caution on everything touched by this genocidal legacy comes at a price, and it's a price our Treaty partners need to be prepared to pay. That is true reconciliation.".That price is always more financial and other reparations..Still, so long as the federal dollars keep flowing, this boondoggle of a scavenger hunt for imaginary missing children buried in unmarked graves will never be turned off, even though there is no credible evidence of a single child murdered while attending any of Canada's Indian Residential Schools..Hymie Rubenstein is the editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, The University of Manitoba
