It has been four years since a small Indigenous Band in British Columbia, Canada announced that the remains of 215 children had been discovered on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (IRS). It has been nearly 10 years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its final report. The intervening years, however, have left most Canadians scratching their heads and asking the same querulous question as Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”
By some metrics, it might appear that Canada has moved on from the moral panic that followed the bombshell press release. Chief Rosanne Casimir would later qualify that what had been identified by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology were not 215 “remains” but 200 “potential burials;” despite the provision of $12.1 million for field work and exhumation of remains, no remains have ever been recovered.
The government funding streams and commissions are now coming to an end. The “Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund,” $217 million (₤ 117.6 million) <a href="https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1647884354823/1647884389372#wb-auto-4">dispersed</a> to 150 Indigenous communities, was wrapped up in March 2025. In the same month, the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools, Missing Children and Unmarked Burials was disbanded.
A month earlier, Parks Canada announced that the site of the former Kamloops Residential School would become the fifth former IRS to be designated a national historic site. Though the press statement called the school the “largest institution in a system designed to carry out what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as cultural genocide,” no mention was made of unmarked or mass graves.
But despite the hasty dismantling of the hastily erected bureaucratic structures, the assumptions and prejudices, even the so-called facts, of that period have become embedded into the national consciousness and are now almost impossible to root out.
Despite the “not one body” refrain echoed in international and independent media, mainstream journalists, politicians and activists continue to speak as if it is still May 2021.
Just recently, the CBC had to issue a correction after its chief political correspondent Rosemary Barton said on air, “there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places across the country.”
In an electoral riding of 100,000 people, a petition calling for the removal of Conservative candidate Aaron Gunn has garnered close to 20,000 signatures. His mistake was to state on social media that the residential school system did not constitute a genocide.
The conversation has now shifted away from mass graves, of which there were none, to the denouncement and criminalisation of something called “residential school denialism.”
In June 2022, then Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti created the Office for the Independent Special Interlocutor (OISI) for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.
Lametti appointed Kimberly Murray, a lawyer and former TRC executive director, as special interlocutor. With a $10.4 million budget, the office had a mandate to identify legal barriers to the search of unmarked graves.
In a June 2022 interview with CTV News, Murray said she expected to have conversations with survivors and Indigenous leadership around legal recourse in the matter of jurisdiction over unmarked graves and suspected untimely deaths of children.
What started as the examination of legal frameworks to aid Indigenous communities in their search for so-called missing children, ended in the creation an entirely new “reparations” framework.
In Oct. 2024, after two and a half years of work, Murray released a two-volume report that focused more on denialism than the identification of unmarked graves.
The executive summary of the Indigenous-led Reparations Framework uses the term “denialism” 50 times and “genocide” 72 times. The report repeatedly asserts that what occurred in Indigenous residential schools was genocide.
The summary calls for reparations for the families of residential school students, an Indigenous-led national commission with a 20-year mandate to investigate missing children associated with residential schools, and for the government to refer to missing children as victims of “enforced disappearance.”
It is important to note that former residential school students were the beneficiary of the largest <a href="$111,265">class action settlement</a> in Canadian history. Settled in 2006, some $3.180 billion in payments were approved, the average being $111,265.
The report also recommends the amendment of both Canada’s Criminal Code and Bill C-63: An Act to Enact the Online Harms Act to make residential school denialism an imprisonable offence. A month earlier, NDP MP Leah Gazan introduced Bill C-413: An Act to amend the Criminal Code (promotion of hatred against Indigenous peoples).
Denialism is defined in the report as “condoning, denying, downplaying, or justifying the Indian Residential School System or by misrepresenting facts relating to it…. It is not the existence of the Indian Residential School System that is being denied: it is the intent, outcomes, and impacts of the System.”
At the National Gathering on Unmarked Graves, the two-day conference at which the OISI report was presented, speakers were seated on a raised stage. At the front was placed a display of Indigenous objects: cradleboards, moccasins, and in the middle, a drum with the number “215” at the center. It was a curious choice. By Oct. 2024, it had been years since Chief Casimir had qualified it was 200 “anomalies” not 215 “remains.”
I asked Noah MacDonald, Archdiocese of Toronto canon lawyer and member of the Michipicoten First Nation, why he thought the number 215 had moved beyond a data point to an emotive symbol.
“I see hanging on to those symbols and language because it's reminiscent of a moment in Canadian history when Indigenous people were believed. The whole world paid attention to the million problems we've been trying to express.”
The report stresses the truth of residential schools is to be found solely in the memories of survivors, including accounts of babies conceived in rape being murdered.
“Survivors attest to the bodies of babies being placed in incinerators at Indian Residential Schools. These testimonies and oral history evidence hold veracity and truthfulness given the extent of corroboration and repetition among Survivors of the same institution and across many different Indian Residential Schools in the country.”
When I questioned MacDonald on this focus upon memory, rather than data, he responded that for many Indigenous communities it was important to focus less on the “implicit facts, but more on the spirit of truth.”
“Regardless of whether a baby was incinerated there, the souls and the persons of young indigenous children were incinerated there, incinerated by this process of assimilation.”
Indigenous communities and opinion are, of course, not a monolith.
Eight days before the OISI report was published, Fr. Cristino Bouvette, priest of the Diocese of Calgary, sat down with YouTuber and Catholic speaker Ken Yasinski, for a conversation on the “mass graves controversy.”
Of mixed Cree, Métis and Italian heritage, Bouvette has the credentials to speak to so-called residential school denialism. His grandmother attended the Edmonton Indian Residential School for 12 years. Chosen to act as the National Liturgical Coordinator for the visit of Pope Francis to Canada in 2022, Bouvette says he has “spent the last four years of my life and ministry completely consumed” by the question of reconciliation.
Bouvette told Yasinski: “This is something I feel very confident I can stand in the face of… the whole concept of residential school denialism. How can I deny what my grandmother lived through? Who can accuse me of denying that?”
“Asking questions isn’t denying anything,” said Bouvette. “If we are not seeking the truth, if we are not trying to understand all of what surrounds what’s happened here, we will never get anywhere. What’s the point of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission if we leave the truth off? You can’t have reconciliation without truth.”
Many Indigenous argue the term “denialist” is less than helpful.
Aaron Pete is a podcaster based in Chilliwack, B.C. and a Chawathil First Nation Councillor whose grandmother attended St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in Ontario.
Pete finds the word “denialist" to be “a very unproductive term.”
“The 'Mass Graves Story' as told by the CBC needs to be a separate conversation from the history of the residential schools told in the Truth & Reconciliation Commission Report,” Pete told me in a phone interview.
Some see broader concerns with the language of denialism applied to the Canadian situation. Barbara Kay, columnist for the <em>National Post</em>, is concerned with the appropriation of the language of the Holocaust, specifically denialism, for the Indian Residential Schools. Kay told me IRS denialism seems to mean something different than Holocaust denialism, which means denying “that the records are correct, that the proofs are proof, that the pictures and the photographs are true.”
“You can’t compare denialism of evidence to denialism of a thought or a belief,” said Kay.
Unfortunately, on the fourth anniversary of the Kamloops announcement, it is the Pontius Pilate question that echoes through Canada.
In the words of Noah MacDonald, “It may come down to different understandings of what truth is. Is truth empirical fact or is truth the spirit of truth?”
<em>(Kukpi7 Chief, Rosanne Casimir, of Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc poses at the site of a makeshift memorial at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, Canada. Photo by COLE BURSTON/AFP via Getty Images)</em>
