"Schools" routinely killing children for petty disciplinary infractions, and for not denying their heritage enough.
It's one of those things one is tempted to say is "too horrible to believe", unless one knows anything about human history. It's believable.
But not in humble, mild-mannered, civic-virtuous Canada. Right?
Well, there's the question.
In Canada as in the US, after the taming of the west and the subjugation of the tribes, there was an effort to eliminate native culture. Whether via overt racism (which certainly existed against the tribes) or a desire to bring stone-age hunter-gatherers into modernity, in both nations there were efforts to acculturate the tribes to the larger national society. Boarding schools - where native children were taught the languages and ways of the western Europeans that had eclipsed their own societies - were a part of those efforts.
You could call it "cultural genocide" - the destruction of an entire culture, if not necessarily the killing of its people - and you wouldn't be wrong.
So - what if the authorities who ran those schools went beyond extinguishing the culture, and went on a long spree of killing the children themselves?
In 2021, the Kamloops Indian Band (Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc) announced that ground-penetrating radar had found evidence of as many as 215 bodies of children buried in unmarked graves in an apple orchard near what had once been a residential school for Canadian "First Nations" children.
It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” stated Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir. “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’emlúps te Secwé pemc is the final resting place of these children".
The story traumatized Canada, with the usual talking heads declaiming the need for a reckoning with Canada's history and, as the chief pointed out above, the present day.
Politicians and media seized on the announcement, and stories of “mass unmarked graves” and “burials of missing children” ricocheted around Canada and indeed much of the world. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set the tone of the public response by ordering Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the “215 children whose lives were taken at the Kamloops residential school,” thus elevating the possible burials to the status of victims of foul play and making Canada sound like a charnel house of murdered children.
According to Canadian newspaper editors, the discovery of the so-called unmarked graves was the “news story of the year.” And the World Press Photo of the Year award went to a “haunting image of red dresses hung on crosses along a roadside, with a rainbow in the background, commemorating children who died at a residential school created to assimilate Indigenous children in Canada.”
One problem - over the past five years, no bodies have been found at Kamloops. Columnist Jonathan Kay in Quillette summarizes (I've added some emphasis):
On Wednesday, it will have been exactly five years since the Kamloops First Nation in British Columbia claimed it has found 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the grounds of the community’s former residential school. In the weeks that followed, gullible reporters transformed the narrative into a kind of horror-movie script, complete with mass murdering priests and midnight burials.
It all turned out to be complete nonsense. In five years, not a single actual grave has been found.
The only evidence that had been offered in support of the original claims consisted of a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the former residential school grounds. As reporters (belatedly) learned, GPR technology merely detects sub-surface soil dislocations—not actual graves. These dislocations can be associated with graves, but also with pipes, rocks, tree roots, and a dozen other common subsurface artifacts. To truly identify actual graves, one must dig—something that the Kamloops First Nation leaders who originally advanced these false claims have conspicuously failed to do; despite having received more than $12-million from Canada’s (equally gullible) government for search activities.
Five years into the scandal, and no bodies have been recovered.
No rational person says there weren't atrocities committed against First Nations, as with Native Americans. Conquest is ugly.
But in a display of the sort of political-conclusion-based reaction we've come to expect from Canada, the response from the British Columbia provincial government, echoing the demands of First Nations organizations, is to try to criminalize any skepticism about the story:
AG Sharma reacts to the Assembly of First Nation’s push to criminalize residential school denialism:
— Sitka Media (@sitkamedia) July 16, 2026
“We’ve also been calling on the federal government to take action through the criminal code.” pic.twitter.com/QAawh0xVup
“We’ve also been calling on the federal government to take action through the criminal code,” Sharma said. She added: “We have seen an unprecedented and terrible rise in residential school denialism here in the legislature and in Victoria. We as a government have solidly condemned it.”
The comments come after British Columbia controversy over statements made by independent MLA Dallas Brodie and other former Conservative MLAs regarding the Kamloops Indian Residential School site and the 2021 ground-penetrating radar findings.
Brodie has publicly said the number of confirmed child burials at the former school site is zero and questioned aspects of media coverage surrounding the findings. Indigenous organizations and government officials have described similar claims as residential school denialism.
It appears burying truth and honest inquiry is more important than finding actual victims.
