Terry Glavin: Kamloops First Nation puts even more distance from 'mass grave' claim (2024)

It’s unlikely to placate a growing constituency of skeptical researchers that has sprung up in reaction to the Trudeau Liberals’ role in inciting an eruption of national hysteria that began with incendiary claims that a “mass grave” had been discovered in a Kamloops orchard in May, 2021.

It may not deflate a move entertained by a succession of Liberal cabinet ministers to criminalize skepticism about lurid and dubious claims involving Catholic acts of cruelty and sadism during the Indian residential school era. The push to equate such skepticism with Holocaust denial is notably unconcerned with facts, anyway.

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But it should go some distance in healing divisions that have opened up among and between lay Catholics and clergy about the way the church hierarchy, including the Vatican, has responded to the clamour. It may be the closest thing to an apology that Canada’s Roman Catholics are likely to hear.

Until last Friday, National Indigenous Day, little was publicly known about the contents of a widely-reported “sacred covenant” entered into on Easter Sunday by Vancouver Archbishop Michael Miller, Kamloops Bishop Joseph Ngyuen and the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Nation chief Rosanne Casimir

The covenant was set in motion by the interventions of former Tk̓emlúps chief Manny Jules and former Assembly of First Nations national chief Phil Fontaine. Approved by church authorities in Rome, it’s probably the most genuine atonement the Catholic episcopate has offered for the harms that came to be associated with the residential schools that Catholic religious orders began administering according to Ottawa’s rules in the 1880s.

The covenant does not shy away from the disgrace of the Catholic church’s acquiescence to federal schools policy that was injurious to Indigenous cultures. The document nonetheless acknowledges the warm historic relationships between Indigenous communities and the Catholic church. The bonds were particularly strong during the early years of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Catholic religious order that was so intimately associated with the schools.

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But what leaps from the covenant’s text is the Tk’emlúps leadership’s acknowledgement of the great harm caused by its misleading May 27, 2021 announcement declaring “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children” in the vicinity of an orchard adjacent to the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential school following a ground-penetrating radar survey.

The idea that Catholic nuns oversaw clandestine burials in the school orchard was first put about by a defrocked protestant minister who arrived on the Canadian scene in the late 1990swith stories about murders, kidnappings, the incineration of children and an archipelago of mass graves at residential schools across the country. The Tk’emlúps’ report of May 27, 2021 gave every impression of confirming what had been one of Canada’s most ghastly urban legends.

“This report has caused renewed grief and dismay in Indigenous communities, especially for those who attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School and for intergenerational survivors,” according to the Easter covenant’s text. “Many of those grieving are devout Catholics who, with others, are seeking solace, affirmation, and accountability from the Catholic Church.”

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The Tk’emlúps’ May, 2021 statement allowed the term “mass grave” to jump from the realm of macabre conspiracy theory to headlines across the country and around the world. A New York Times headline from the following day: “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” CTV News: “The discovery of the mass grave is gripping the nation tonight. . .” The Toronto Star: Mass grave of Indigenous children discovered in Kamloops BC.The CBC: “After childrens’ mass grave found, advocates say it’s time to scan all residential school sites.”

The Trudeau government jumped on the story, calling for a period of national reckoning along the lines of the American soul-searching exercise precipitated by the 2020 murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a Minneapolis police officer. That exercise ended up in waves of violent civil disturbances.

By the time Chief Casimir first tried to set the record straight, five days after its first shocking statement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had already lowered the flag on Parliament Hill and on all flags across the country. They would remain at half-mast for several months, and Ottawa committed $320 million to assist in the search for graves around residential school sites across Canada.

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In her first clarification, Casimir noted that the GPR survey was “very preliminary,” referring to the “initial horrific findings of what potentially could be, they are very preliminary. . . there could very well be children beneath the surface.” Three days later, Casimir was even clearer: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.”

However, the waters were muddied the following month when Casimir is recorded as having moved a motion at a gathering of the Assembly of First Nations, referring to “the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

Before 2021 was over, a series of similarly-reported “discoveries” appeared in the news media, one after the other, involving allegations of secret or undisclosed burials of what added up to roughly 1,300 children at old residential-school sites. As it eventually turned out, in each case the confirmed burials were in known cemeteries, and the children’s deaths, almost entirely from infectious diseases, were dutifully recorded. There’s still sparse evidence that there are any “missing children,” strictly speaking, from the residential-school period.

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But the die was cast in Kamloops. Across Canada dozens of churches and shrines were desecrated, vandalized, and in many cases, burned to the ground, perhaps most poignantly old Indian reserve churches beloved of generations of Indigenous Catholics. While it became routine to hear maudlin expressions of discomfort from Trudeau and his ministers, there were riots, statues were toppled, and anti-Catholic hate crimes nearly tripled. In 2021, Statistics Canada noted “the highest number of hate crimes targeting a religion since comparable data have been recorded.”

Last month, Chief Casimir hinted strongly at what could be construed as repentance, or regret, on the third anniversary of the uproars. She announced a “day of reflection” in almost exactly the same words as her initial 2021 statement, describing the same “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented.” Except this new version referred to “the stark truth” that came to light during the GPR survey as “preliminary findings” confirming that what had been detected were “215 anomalies.”

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The covenant text released on Friday goes even further, referring to preliminary GPR findings of “roughly 200” anomalies, “some of which might be unmarked graves of former students,” but more research would be required “to determine what exists in that part of the former residential school site.”

From the outset, even among Tk’emlúps people there was a great deal of skepticism and disbelief in stories about nuns waking children in the middle of the night to bury their murdered classmates under the light of the moon.

In the summer of 2022, Casimir’s office was presented with an independent site-inspection report that strongly suggested that whatever “anomalies” were detected in the original GPR survey, they were likely the result of ground disturbances going back decades, from irrigation ditches and backhoe trenches to utility lines, water lines and even earlier archeological digs. By then, 14 leading Tk’emlúps families had already told Casimir that an excavation of some kind was necessary to clear things up.

No excavation has occurred, and none is planned. Even so, the covenant grants all Canadians a degree of mercy for their absurd histrionics over the residential-school alarms. The Catholic clergy, Manny Jules and Phil Fontaine and the Tk’emlúps community should be thanked for their interventions, perhaps especially by Indigenous Catholics who have had their faith and their church traduced and assaulted in an outbreak of mass panic the Trudeau government was only too happy to incubate, nurture and finance.

National Post

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