In Quillette, Jonathan Kay updates the year-old sensational stories about First Nations children being buried in unmarked (in more unhinged reporting it might have been “mass”) graves on the grounds of former Residential Schools in Canada:

Canada’s unmarked-graves story broke on May 27th, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reported the existence of ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data that indicated regularly spaced subterranean soil disturbances on the grounds of a former Indigenous Residential School that had operated in Kamloops, BC between 1893 and 1978. In addition, the First Nation’s leaders asserted their belief that these soil disturbances corresponded to unmarked graves of Indigenous children who’d died while attending the school.

The story became an immediate sensation in the Canadian media; and remained so for months, even after the GPR expert on whom the First Nation relied, Sarah Beaulieu, carefully noted that the radar survey results didn’t necessarily indicate the presence of graves — let alone graves that had been unmarked, graves of Indigenous people, or graves of children. Contrary to what many Canadians came to believe during that heady period, GPR survey data doesn’t yield X-ray-style images that show bodies or coffins. What it typically shows are disruptions in soil and sediment. Investigators then need to dig up the ground to determine what actually lies underneath.

An explanatory image posted by GeoScan, a Canadian Ground-Penetrating-Radar service provider, showing how mapped GPR data can indicate the possible presence of graves.
Image via Quillette.

But those details were swept aside during what, in retrospect, appears to have been a true nation-wide social panic. As other Indigenous groups announced that they’d be conducting their own GPR surveys, media figures confidently asserted that the original Canadian Residential-School student death-toll estimate of 3,201 would soon double or even triple. One op-ed writer went so far as to declare that “the discovery of the graves of the children in Kamloops may be Canada’s Holocaust moment.” Dramatic, tear-drenched acts of public atonement unfolded everywhere, with many July 1st Canada Day celebrations being either cancelled or transformed into opportunities for morose self-laceration.

I was one of many Canadians who initially got swept up with all of this — in large part because it seemed as if everyone in the media was speaking with one voice, including journalists I’d known and respected for many years. Looking back on the coverage, I note that headline writers mostly skipped over the technical bits about soil dislocations and such, and went straight to “bodies” and “graves”. And the stories often were interspersed with credulous recitations of dubious tales featuring live babies being thrown into furnaces or buried alive.

The whole mission of Canada’s church-run Residential School system was to assimilate Indigenous people into white Canadian society, usually against their will, while forcing children to leave their families and communities for months or even years at a time. No one disputes that many students were subject to cruel (and sometimes even predatory) treatment and substandard medical care. Certainly, the death rate for Indigenous children attending these schools was much higher than that for children in the general population. No, I never bought into the idea that there was any kind of mass-murder plot going on at these schools. But it hardly seemed far-fetched that some victims of mistreatment and neglect had been buried in unmarked graves — “off the books”, so to speak—by malevolent white teachers, school administrators, and priests seeking to evade responsibility for their actions.

The other important aspect to mention is that — like most other Canadians, I’m guessing — I believed we were only a few days or weeks from seeing real physical evidence plucked from the earth. So it didn’t much matter to me that early commentators were temporarily playing fast and loose with the distinction between GPR data and actual corpses.

Canadians were being told that the old orchard in Kamloops where the GPR data had been collected was a crime scene — a site of mass murder, and the final resting place of 215 child homicide victims. As I’ve reasoned elsewhere: If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried somewhere in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police crawling all over the place, looking for remains that could be tested and identified. And so I naturally assumed the same thing soon would be happening in Kamloops.

But … no. Not at all, in fact.

As I wrote over a year ago, the way the story swept the media was as if the whole Residential School history was somehow new and previously unknown:

Despite being Canadian, my interest in Canadian history centres mostly on economic, naval, and military aspects, but I was certainly aware that the residential school system was a black mark on Canada’s historical dealings with First Nations and that the general outline of events — if not the gruesome details — had been known for many years. The first time I found out about it was in middle school, through what we’d now call a “Young Adult” novel about a young First Nations boy escaping from the residential school he’d been sent to and his attempts to travel hundreds of miles to get home. I read it in the early 70s and it may have been published up to a decade before then (I no longer remember the author’s name or the title of the book, unfortunately).

If I, as a schoolchild, knew something of this fifty years ago, why have people younger than me been shocked and appalled to be hearing about this widespread tragedy for the first time now?