Canada’s “Grave” Error Proves Very Costly
This is one of the more bizarre and complicated stories I have encountered in a while. It shouldn’t be, it should be simple and straightforward… but it isn’t.
In 2021, Canada was shocked by reports that the unmarked graves of 215 children were discovered on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the largest institution in the residential school system. The school, which opened under Roman Catholic administration in 1890, had an enrollment that peaked at about 500 students in the 1950s.
The central government took over the school’s administration in 1969 and used it as a residence for local students until its closure in 1978.
It must be understood that unmarked graves are totally different from mass graves. Mass graves are generally considered to be a representation of disrespect, and in some cases, genocide may even have been a possibility. An unmarked grave does not mean that the dead were disrespected. Often the markers may have been destroyed by natural elements over time or removed without understanding what they were.
When the report came out, I believe many people failed to grasp the difference and immediately imagined a mass grave scenario. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said it was a “painful reminder” of a “shameful chapter of our country’s history.”
The implication from Trudeau and others was that Christian schools educating Native American children in Canada during the nineteenth century had buried their remains in large, unmarked, or mass graves.
Rosanne Casimir, the chief of the Kamloops community in British Columbia, stated that the preliminary finding represented an unimaginable loss that the school’s administrators never recorded.
Casimir continued to pour on the guilt:
“To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” MS Casimir said. “Some were as young as three years old.”
“We sought out a way to confirm that knowing out of deepest respect and love for those lost children and their families, understanding that Tk’emlups te Secwepemc is the final resting place of these children.”
The announcement of these findings and the subsequent reactions resulted in the founding and funding of the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools Missing Children, and Unmarked Burials, which totaled around $320 million.
The existence of the committee and organization is founded on the belief that hundreds of children were killed at residential schools and buried in unmarked graves. The initial claims made in 2021 resulted in apologies, riots, and the vandalism or destruction of fifty-five Canadian churches, which The Daily Wire reported.
However, there is a problem. After four years of searching, no one has been able to locate any of these graves, and now the Canadian government is being compelled to withdraw funding from the effort. A recent analysis by The Daily Wire concluded that, despite widespread campaigns, no remains have been found.
The utterly shameful part of this story is how it began. The remains were discovered by anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu, who utilized ground-penetrating radar to locate the remains believed to be buried on the grounds between 1890 and 1978.
According to a report from The Daily Wire at the time, no remains had been excavated. The preliminary findings regarding the remains were based on observations of depressions and abnormalities in the soil of an apple orchard near the school rather than on exhumed remains. Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Montreal, noted this in an article published in the Canadian journal The Dorchester Review.
Rouillard’s writing followed Beaulieu’s revision of her findings, where she reduced the number of remains she claimed to have discovered from 215 to 200 “probable burials.” However, Beaulieu could never confirm whether these remains belonged to children or were simply tree roots, as the site had not been excavated.
Huh? What?
That’s right, folks. An anthropologist noticed some unusual depressions in an apple orchard near the school, used ground-penetrating radar, and, without doing any excavation, decided that 215 children were buried there—a figure she later reduced to 200.
Even more outrageous was the statement from Roseanne Casimir who actually put ages on bodies that weren’t there when she stated:
“To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” MS Casimir said. “Some were as young as three years old.”
While Beaulieu was reducing the body count from 215 to 200, Casimir declared that “some were as young as three years old.”
The Daily Wire reported that it turns out that these bodies were nothing more than tree roots, as the Canadian government eventually excavated the site and spent hundreds of millions of dollars without finding any remains.
After four years, Canada is finally pulling the funds on this farce, but the damage has already been done. Christianity was again unjustly painted as evil and oppressive because the left never took the time to find the truth. Fifty-five churches were either vandalized or destroyed because an alarmist discovered some tree roots and fed the unconfirmed information to a group of radicals that were more than happy to run with the lie.
