Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?

“I find this story astonishing as an outsider,” a British historian told me on social media last week. “Can I just confirm what I believe to be the case: There is no proof of any burials… just GPR [ground-penetrating radar] ‘anomalies’ [that] haven’t been investigated? The 215 children are, as things stand, entirely notional?”

The answer, in a word, is yes. Of the 215 “unmarked graves” of Indigenous children that were said to have been “discovered” on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia four years ago, not a single one has actually been shown to exist.

As I’ve documented in a number of other Quillette articles, the original May 2021 unmarked-graves announcement was based on a property survey performed using the aforementioned GPR technology. Thanks to the flood of credulous media reports that followed, Canadians were given the impression that these radargrams displayed unmistakable images of child graves—perhaps even skeletons of the (claimed) victims.

Reporters accompanied these reports with descriptions of unspeakable crimes, supposedly sourced to the eyewitness memories of Indigenous elders—including children woken up in the middle of the night to dig shallow graves for their murdered friends. In response, the cry went up for Canada to be investigated by the International Criminal Court. The editorial board of the Calgary Herald—typical of the entire Canadian media establishment—declared, “It’s time to investigate Kamloops residential home as a crime against humanity.” Justin Trudeau lowered flags on federal buildings for almost six months. Nikki Ashton, a progressive federal politician, described Kamloops as a scene of “genocide” and “mass murder,” not to mention a giant “torture chamber” littered with “mass graves.”

It all seems completely ludicrous in hindsight. But at the time, Ashton’s description of Canada as a genocide state was seen as completely unexceptional—even banal. Everyone was saying this sort of thing in late May and early June of 2021. After all, they’d found the actual bodies, hadn’t they? As the Toronto Star put it flatly in a headline, “The remains of 215 children have been found.” The only task now was to scour the earth to determine how many more hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Indigenous children had been dispatched in a similarly homicidal manner.

The journalists who reported the original story seem to have had absolutely no idea that all these GPR scans actually indicated were subterranean soil dislocations—which might be associated with graves, yes, but also (as was much more likely) old pipes, septic lines, irrigation ditches, bedrock cracks, groundwater sources, mineral deposits, buried utility lines, and landfill artefacts.

Nor did they realise that many of the tall tales of midnight murders they were signal-boosting could be traced to utterly bizarre conspiracy theories once circulated by a defrocked priest named Kevin Arnett—a man who’d also claimed he’d witnessed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip personally kidnap a group of Kamloops students in 1964.

Grave Error: Correcting the False Narrative of Canada’s “Missing Children” | C2C Journal

In an exclusive preview of his new book, co-editor Tom Flanagan explains how the “missing children” narrative first took shape and how this book sets things straight.

C2C JournalTom Flanagan

No one has any idea what underground banalities gave rise to those 215 soil dislocations, because the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, as the Indigenous community in question is officially known, has refused to show anyone all of the data; and has now gone silent on the issue, after having pocketed more than $12-million CAD from the federal government, about $8-million of which was supposed to have been directed toward researching those supposed graves. The few reporters who’ve dared ask for more evidence have been denounced by activists as ghouls, and instructed that such inquiries represent a new form of colonial trauma.

The registered on-reserve population of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation comprises just 543 people. So the federal outlay works out to about $22,000 per person—enough to employ literally the entire community for many months in the task of investigating graves that supposedly lay in precisely identified locations just a few feet from the earth’s surface.

But after four years and $8-million, not a single grave has been found in Kamloops following the GPR survey. It’s impossible to disprove the idea that one or more graves might be found at some point in the future. But the idea that there are 215 of them, much less that they contain murdered children, has become a grim farce.

Yet it is a very strange kind of farce, insofar as almost no public figure in Canada has had the courage to candidly revisit the apocalyptic pronouncements made during the initial unmarked-graves social panic of 2021.

During that period, the idea of these 215 little Indigenous martyrs being killed off by the priests and nuns who ran the Kamloops Indian Residential School became a sacred myth. And no one in the Canadian political, media, or (as we shall see) legal establishment has any idea how to stand down from this myth now that it’s been debunked. Most politicians and journalists have simply stopped talking about it entirely, presumably in hopes that the issue will fade into obscurity with the passage of time.

Canada’s Faltering ‘Unmarked Graves’ Narrative Goes to Court

When lawyers asked the Law Society of British Columbia to correct the false claim that ‘the bodies of 215 children’ were discovered in Kamloops, the legal regulator accused them of bigotry.

QuilletteJonathan Kay

But there are some who continue to go double or nothing on the original 2021-era misinformation. As I first reported in September, these include the Law Society of British Columbia, whose mandatory Indigenous Training course module includes the following language:

On May 27, 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Nation reported the discovery of an unmarked burial site containing the bodies of 215 children on the former Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds. Although the discovery was shocking to many Canadians, many Indigenous residential school survivors had previously reported the existence of unmarked burial sites, and the unexplained disappearances of children; the discovery confirms what survivors have been saying all along.

As I noted back in 2024, the claims here aren’t merely exaggerated or misleading. They’re flat out wrong, especially in regard to the use of the word, “confirms.”

This misinformation campaign would be a minor scandal if the Law Society were a run-of-the-mill civic organisation. But it’s not. Rather, it’s the regulatory body that ensures B.C. lawyers act ethically and uphold important liberal values such as due process and the presumption of innocence—principles at variance with the repetition of debunked lies that cast swathes of B.C. residential-school teachers and administrators as being complicit in a fictional mass-murder conspiracy.

The Law Society’s contempt for the truth was so galling that two B.C. lawyers proved willing to break the taboos surrounding candid discussion of the unmarked-graves issue, and put forward a resolution proposing that the words, “discovery of an unmarked burial site” be replaced with “discovery of a potentially unmarked burial site”; and that the words, “the discovery confirms what survivors have been saying all along” be deleted.

Neither lawyer sought to embarrass the Law Society in public. Indeed, they tried to resolve the issue discreetly through private channels. But they were stonewalled by the Law Society, which then responded to their public resolution by seeking to smear the two dissidents as ignorant, racist, and “vexatious.”

If this were still 2021, 2022, or even 2023, the Law Society would have likely succeeded in bullying its membership into silence. But it’s not. And now James Heller, one of the two lawyers who sought to correct the Indigenous Training materials, is suing the Law Society for defamation, noting that the body “has kept the press release [allegedly defaming him] online despite knowing of its false and damaging nature… conduct [that] reflects bad faith, high-handedness, arrogance, malice and a marked departure from ordinary standards of decent behaviour.”

Michael Higgins: Lawyer suing his own law society for libel over Kamloops ‘graves’

A lawsuit alleges the Law Society of British Columbia refused to correct factually inaccurate statements about residential schools

National PostMichael Higgins

The case will likely grind on for months, or even years, as the Law Society has deep pockets (thanks to the $4,300 mandatory annual fee it charges full-time lawyers in the province); and every incentive to delay a public courtroom spectacle in which its officers will have to explain why they lie to their own members while smearing whistleblowers as bigots. But in the meantime, the response from third parties has been telling.

On 22 February, Dallas Brodie, the Attorney General Critic for the Conservative Party of British Columbia, which forms the Official Opposition in B.C.’s Legislative Assembly, tweeted out the story of Heller’s lawsuit along with the following comments:

The number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero. Zero. No one should be afraid of the truth. Not lawyers, their governing bodies, [nor] anyone else. As a former defence lawyer, I experienced why facts matter. False or unsubstantiated claims could have put innocent clients of mine behind bars. Can we trust our legal system if lawyers are no longer free to insist upon the facts? As Attorney General critic, I am compelled to act. In the coming days, I will engage [B.C. Attorney General Niki] Sharma and the Law Society over these mandatory indigenous course materials and the apparent mistreatment of the lawyers who requested corrections to them.

In a normal timeline, none of this would be even mildly controversial: Everything Brodie wrote was accurate (as even her most aggressive public critics would implicitly acknowledge when they attacked her with ad homimens instead of engaging with her claims). But when it comes to this topic, Canadians do not inhabit a “normal” timeline; as many public figures continue to desperately censure any effort to revisit false claims.

The push to criminalize residential school denialism in Canada | Globalnews.ca

More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996. An estimated 6,000 children died in the facilities.

Global NewsThe Canadian Press

Over the last year, in fact, some lawmakers have even proposed criminalising Canadians who question the officially sanctioned mythology about Kamloops and other residential schools. At least one Canadian professor lost her job for pointing out that those 215 bodies don’t actually exist. And on social media, progressive enforcers do their best to tar anyone who goes off script as being a “denier” (or “denialist”), a word selected specifically as a means to cast fact-based inquiry concerning unmarked graves as morally tantamount to Holocaust denial.

It’s a deeply unsettling cult of self-censorship that, to my knowledge, has no precedent in any other liberal democracy during my lifetime.

Needless to say, myths, social panics, and conspiracy theories spread regularly in all corners of the planet. But one typically can depend on mainstream media, politicians, and civic organisations to at least try to investigate and debunk such tall tales. With only a few exceptions—such as the National Post—that hasn’t happened in this case. The original media buy-in on the story was so hard, and so universal, that almost every single mainstream outlet risks public humiliation (not to mention accusations of “denialism”) if its journalists revisit the past.

It’s a deeply unsettling cult of self-censorship that, to my knowledge, has no precedent in any other liberal democracy during my lifetime.

Put another way: The desire for a scoop, which is what usually generates healthy competition among journalists, has been suffocated by a collective campaign of reputational ass protection.

For many Canadian columnists, editors, and reporters, it’s important to remember, this was the only news story they worked on during late May and June 2021. It was news that, at least in Canada, was comparable to 9/11, or the JFK assassination. And all these journalists were swimming in social-media bathwater full of false references to the 215 “bodies,” “graves,” “human remains,” “stolen children,” that had supposedly been discovered. The Canadian media, highly vulnerable to herd behaviour even at the best of times, was transformed into a giant misinformation-soaked hive mind.

Walking back their gullibility by publishing the necessary corrections would be a lengthy and humiliating exercise for these journalists. And if the competition still isn’t doing it, the logic goes, why should I? Far better to simply stop talking about the issue entirely, and rely on lingering taboos to deflect awkward questions about past coverage.

Another tactic is character assassination. One of Dallas Brodie’s own fellow caucus members has (obscenely) suggested that she’s channelling the same malevolent spirit as a grave-digging trespasser despoiling Indigenous land. The Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs denounced Brodie’s “truth-seeking”—they actually put the term in scare quotes—as “a smokescreen for anti-Indigenous racism.” And Christine Boyle, B.C.’s Minister of Indigenous Relations (who may be remembered by some Quillette readers for her efforts to defund a women’s rape crisis centre because it refused to cater to trans-identified biological men), denounced Brodie as “abhorrent,” and then got upset when Brodie escaped “consequences” for speaking truthfully.

Tellingly, not a single one of these critics attempted to explain what was incorrect about what Brodie had said—because, of course, none of them could.

And then there’s Nikki Ashton, the above-referenced politician who’d described Kamloops as a giant torture chamber. On X, her comments exploded (and not in a good way) after she claimed that Brodie “denies the atrocities in residential schools ever happened.”

This is a complete fabrication on Ashton’s part: Brodie never said any such thing, and Ashton knows it. It’s an example of how a desperate rearguard campaign to defend one lie gives birth to many more.

Perhaps no one has tried harder to suppress candid discussions about Kamloops than Sean Carleton, a white Indigenous Studies professor at the University of Manitoba who brands himself a “settler historian,” and spends much of his time on X, somewhat hysterically denouncing “deniers” such as Brodie (and, every once in a while, me). But he’s worth quoting on an important point about where Kamloops stands in relation to the wider debate about Indigenous rights in Canada. Speaking to CBC this week, he warned that, “if they [i.e. wrong-thinking “deniers”] can delegitimize Kamloops, then they can delegitimize the entire residential school narrative.”

By my lights, what Carleton means to argue by this is that the claimed discovery of 215 child graves in Kamloops is the thing that finally pricked the conscience of Canadians when it comes to their often shameful history of mistreating Indigenous peoples. And so if it’s suddenly seen as socially acceptable to say out loud that those graves don’t seem to exist, the logic goes, all of that precious consciousness-raising may be undone.

Even if those 215 graves are mythical, in other words, they comprise a useful myth. And so who but a racist would seek to debunk it?

I’ve had my differences with Carleton in the past (and I continue to regard his online hunt for “denialists” as completely scurrilous and unhinged). But I think it’s important to be fair to him on this point (as I interpret it).

He and I agree that Canada’s history is stained with shameful policies that forced many Indigenous communities to send their children to schools that, while hardly the mass-murdering human abattoirs of Ashton’s imagination, often did treat Indigenous children in a cruel, or at least neglectful, fashion. Children were typically prevented from learning their ancestral languages, and stripped of their cultures. At least 3,200 Indigenous children are known to have perished after attending residential schools—typically from infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. While these facts have been on the public record for years, many Canadians didn’t really educate themselves about them until the issue of Kamloops’ claimed unmarked graves became (as the Canadian Press called it) Canada’s “story of the year.” And Indigenous people aren’t wrong to worry that their cause will be forgotten, especially now that the same progressive Canadians who denounced their country as genocidal just four years ago have now reinvented themselves as ultra-patriotic Maple Leaf jingoists in response to Donald Trump’s threats about turning Canada into a fifty-first state.

But no social movement can nourish itself indefinitely on a diet of lies. And Canadians, while often gullible and timid, aren’t actually stupid.

In a way, the enforced taboo surrounding Kamloops indicates a certain contempt for the collective Canadian intellect—as it suggests that unless the narrative of Indigenous suffering is fictionally reinvented as a shocking horror-movie narrative in which serial-killing masterminds butcher defenceless children, we will all stop caring. I utterly reject that logic, as do a growing list of other outspoken Canadian thinkers.

No social movement can nourish itself indefinitely on a diet of lies. And Canadians, while often gullible and timid, aren’t actually stupid.

If you keep telling every Canadian that he’s a racist enemy of reconciliation if he doesn’t attest to the existence of 215 fictional child graves, there will inevitably come a time when those people finally will take you at your word, and say back to you, “You’re right. I’m done.” And based on the online replies that Carleton, Ashton, Boyle, and the Law Society have all received in regard to their latest efforts to stifle the truth, I’d say that day has just about arrived.