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Year of the Graves
I am somehow just getting to this now and from what I'm seeing, this seems to be one of the biggest culture war clusterfucks that has flown mostly under my radar. It started when media began reporting that the graves of 251 children (later 200) had been found near the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
Now, my understanding is that the evidence for the Kamloops graves are in fact very scant. The basis for the claim that 251 unmarked graves were found at Kamloops is based on the fact that ground penetrating radar or GPR identified irregularities in the ground near the Kamloops residential school that they simply interpreted as unmarked graves. GPR, however, can really only show disruptions in soil and sediment, and no excavations of the supposed graves have been done yet. In other words, nobody knows if it even is a burial site, let alone a children's grave.
At the Kamloops site, a juvenile tooth and a rib was cited as evidence of there being an actual grave underneath. Sarah Beaulieu, the person doing the GPR work, stated in her press conference that the tooth and rib were discovered in the late 90s and early 2000s. The tooth was discovered in an excavation by Simon Fraser University, and the rib was supposedly found in the area by a tourist and brought to the museum. However, when people reached out to Simon Fraser University, they replied that the juvenile tooth was in fact verified to be not human. Further attempts to get additional information about the tooth resulted in the university saying that the Kamloops legal team advised them not to respond to any queries from the public about the unmarked graves.
To be honest, there's been a serious lack of transparency surrounding this whole thing which really makes me think that a lot of the findings are suspect. Forget excavations, I am not aware of there being any kind of detailed writeup of the evidence surrounding the GPR findings, or any release of the work on the tooth and the rib bone. Pretty much nothing exists for the public to chew on, apart from a few very rigour-less media releases from the Kamloops band and a press conference from Beaulieu. Oh, and Indigenous "knowing", of course.
I want to properly cement just how inconclusive GPR findings are. In Sarah Beaulieu's press conference, when questioned about if the 215 number was still accurate, Beaulieu states that initially the estimate was 215 graves which had later been revised down to 200 because after the survey was done she became aware of previous excavations that had been done in the area that overlapped with her survey area. So if she can't with confidence distinguish between a burial and excavation work, that seems to suggest that GPR can't really tell you much.
Furthermore, there have been other attempts to find graves with GPR. For example, there was an attempt to find unmarked graves at the former Camsell hospital, where Indigenous people with tuberculosis were treated for decades. Some believed former patients may have been buried on the grounds. As the CBC article on the topic notes: "Thirteen spots flagged by ground-penetrating radar were dug up earlier this summer. Over the past two days another 21 such anomalies were uncovered but only found debris." They eventually wrapped up the search having found nothing. In other words, things that raise alarm according to GPR can actually be any number of other things.
It is also useful to note that most of what used to be the Kamloops residential school orchard has already been excavated prior to the new GPR findings, over 30% of the site has been excavated for various construction and research purposes and no graves were discovered. Note, these excavations started after accusations of the orchard being used to hide graves begun. As this article notes, with more than 30% of the orchard already excavated, is it probable that 200 burials were just missed by previous operations that Beaulieu is just finding now?
Additionally, the survey site Beaulieu was operating in is very disturbed by human activity, casting even more doubt on the idea that what she's seeing are graves. "Several of the 200 “probable burials” overlap with a utilities trench dug in 1998, and still other “probable burials” follow the route of old roads or correlate suggestively with the pattern of previous plantings, furrows and underground sewage disposal beds". I don't know for sure if that can create the GPR findings here, but given the fact that the excavation of multiple anomalies at Camsell hospital yielded no graves, other hypotheses should be considered.
So we basically have nothing here. But the Kamloops Band made a media release on 27 May 2021 stating that there was "confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School". Media reports on it in the very same way, and Canada goes crazy over this. Canadians desecrate church after church, something which even Indigenous leaders told them to stop doing.
While there are other "discoveries" of "unmarked graves" elsewhere near other residential schools which have been revealed after Kamloops, they seem to be similarly questionable. The other very publicised one is by the Cowessess First Nation, disclosing the "discovery" of 751 unmarked graves at a cemetery near the former Marieval Indian Residential School.
This one, however, is even more questionable than the Kamloops one. What makes this especially incredible is that this was indeed a graveyard, but it was not an unmarked grave. The discovery was made at a community cemetery where basically everyone was buried, apparently including non-First Nations people. And the reason why they found "751 unmarked graves" was because many of the graveyard's crosses and headstones were simply taken down, not because they were clandestinely buried. According to the register of baptisms, marriages and burials from 1885 to 1933, there are graves of adults as well as preschool-age children as well as those who died at birth. It is at the moment unclear how many of the graves are actually from the residential school. Given that this was a community cemetery, there are almost certainly some, but the inflated numbers being quoted now are almost certainly wrong. "Some people died at a school and were buried at a community graveyard" isn't nearly as dramatic as "hundreds of unmarked graves" is.
The article notes that there are some survey flags dotting areas outside the cemetery, however this again runs into the very same problem that the site has not been excavated and has simply been assumed through GPR sensing disturbances in the soil.
Probably the most interesting one so far is the Star Blanket Cree's discovery of 2,000 anomalies near the Lebret Indian Residential School, and their accompanying find of a jawbone. Again, these were found using GPR, which carries all the previous caveats. Sheldon Poitras, the ground search lead for the investigation, scoped the findings appropriately, stating "Does that mean there’s 2,000 unmarked graves? We don’t think so. GPR can’t definitively say that’s something. It could be a stone under the ground, it could be a clump of clay, it could be a piece of wood or it could be something. We don’t know yet." So the people doing the work here are telling people not to jump to conclusions based on GPR alone.
As to the jawbone finding, we know almost nothing at all about it. Supposedly it was found near a gopher hole. However, as this article states "the provenance of ex situ bones – objects found away from their original site and the valuable context this provides – should always be treated with caution. A bone fragment could have been dug up where it was found or it could have been carried there from elsewhere, such as the community’s cemetery, by a gopher or other animal, or even deposited by a mischievous person". And even if this is a gravesite, one can't simply assume that it is a residential school gravesite. They could be older Indigenous gravesites unrelated to the residential school, for example, and only excavation can tell you what it is.
I'm not going to make predictions at this point, but the reaction of people has been disproportionate considering the at best inconclusive evidence thus far, and anyone who actually cares about accuracy runs into this problem: If you question the findings on the basis of the weakness of the evidence, you're basically tantamount to a Holocaust denier. If you ask for excavation and confirmation, you're just asking for Indigenous people to be retraumatised. The only non-racist thing to do is to nod your head and demonstrate a sufficient amount of piety.
Also, I have no stake in this. I'm not Canadian, and as a result I have no impetus to avoid accounting for any Canadian history. And if Canadians want to destroy their country in paroxysms of guilt and shame, I certainly won't stop them. But this seems insane.
This example fits the following narrative pattern:
An institution X used to have broad support, but now we* recognize it as harmful or bad, though they* still defend it.
Breaking news: evidence E that X was far worse than we* knew! (But not worse than we* can imagine!) So X was altogether evil!!
(Whisper among us*:)
"Isn't that evidence kind of weak? I mean, X still evil, but ..."
"Shh! X was evil, don't undermine the narrative! They* will latch on to it!"
[* For some variation of we and they.]
Once the narrative transitions from "X bad" to "X evil", any questioning of evidence E that precipitated that transition is questioning that X is evil, as opposed to merely bad (from the narrative's perspective).
In the Kamloops graves case, there is a competing impetus: physical anthropologists and archeologists (who are part of we* in this case) very much want to preserve their status as scientists, so they have a strong stake in upholding the rigor of their methods. The Wikipedia entry for Kamloops Indian Residential School reflects this process. The "Possible Unmarked Graves" section is written in a cautious neutral tone, and points to specific plans for corroboration of the evidence:
The Kamloops graves case, therefore, is a very interesting case to watch, and I thank you for putting together such a great effort post on its progress.
I think this is one of the most important mechanisms underlying the culture war today. There's strong social pressure against questioning or denying claims that are favourable to the ingroup's preferred narrative, even when those claims are unambiguously wrong. Why are certain memes with low factual basis (e.g. racist police are murdering black men en masse) so prevalent? The pat, cynical explanation would be to say that everyone on the left is willing to lie to push their preferred narrative, but I don't think that's actually correct. The vast majority of the tribe truly believes these claims, because they haven't been exposed to any serious counter-arguments. Why? Because counter-arguments from within the tribe are socially proscribed, and bring the risk of ostracism, and counter-arguments from the outgroup are assumed to be in bad faith. Because of this mechanism, a false claim which is highly favourable to the tribe's priors can spread rapidly once it enters the memetic landscape (which only takes one bad actor, or even just an innocent error or cascade of minor rhetorical exaggerations). The "a black woman invented the telescope" meme kind of speaks to this dynamic.
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