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In the last week, some international news outlets published claims that Canada has fallen for one of the biggest hoaxes in its history.

“Alleged mass grave of Indigenous children at Catholic schools across Canada contains NO BODIES,” declared Britain’s Daily Mail last Thursday. “No human remains found two years after claims of ‘mass graves’ in Canada,”headlined the New York Post. The American Conservativeclaimed Canada has perpetrated an “anti-Catholic blood libel.”

In the spring of 2021, a series of ground-penetrating radar surveys near the sites of former Indian Residential Schools uncovered anomalies that appeared to be consistent with children’s graves. In the nationwide protests that followed, more than 60 Canadian churches were vandalized or destroyed, and statues were pulled down in virtually every major city.

The surveys would help spawn a new holiday, Truth and Reconciliation Day, prompt an official visit by Pope Francis and result in Canadian flags being kept at half-mast for a record-breaking five consecutive months.

And then, just last month, an excavation at the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitobadetermined that 14 “anomalies” suspected to be children’s graves were actually nothing. To date, of the hundreds of suspected graves identified starting in 2021, Pine Creek is the only one that has been followed up with an archeological dig.

But there’s just one problem with claims that this was all an engineered hoax: The preliminary claims of First Nations performing the surveys did not state that these were “mass graves,” that they were deliberately concealed or that they were the result of homicide. At least in the beginning, the claims of “mass graves” or mass murder would stem mostly from foreign news outlets.

The events of 2021 all kicked off with a May 27 press release from Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announcing that a radar survey near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School had found “confirmation of the remains of 215 children.”

In operation for more than 80 years, the school was already well-known for having disproportionate rates of student deaths who were often buried onsite. Using church and government records, the 2015 final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission wasable to name more than 50 children known to have died at the school. But the 215 were believed to be “undocumented deaths,” according to a statement by T’kemlups Chief Rosanne Casimir.

Three similar announcements followed throughout the summer, each one spurring a new wave of sensationalized domestic and international headlines. But in all these cases, First Nations were careful to note that the graves were either within existing cemeteries, were previously known about or may not even be children’s graves with any link to a residential school.

“Although these findings are tragic, they are still undergoing analysis and the history of this area is a complex one,” cautioned oneJuly announcement by the Ktunaxa community of ʔaq̓am regarding the discovery of 182 suspected graves near the former site of the St. Eugene’s Mission School outside Cranbrook, B.C.

ʔaq̓am Chief Joe Pierre would later clarify that it was “extremely difficult to establish whether or not these unmarked graves contain the remains of children who attended the St. Eugene residential school.”

When the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan announced a survey showing 751 unmarked graves near the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School, Chief Cadmus Delorme was careful to say they were not a mass grave. Rather, these were plots within a larger Catholic cemetery whose headstones Delorme said had been removed by Catholic authorities. “This is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves,”he said.

A leaked internal email by the Penelakut Tribe of B.C. mentioned about 160 unmarked graves near the former Kuper Island Residential School, leading to wide-ranging reports of another batch of confirmed residential school graves. Far less attention was given to afollow-up Penelakut statement in which authorities said the figure wasn’t supposed to be made public and wasn’t even necessarily related to the school.

“The local Indigenous leaders most directly involved in last summer’s ‘discoveries’ tended to be the most cautious of all the various participants in the rancorous public debates. In some cases, those local leaders had never even intended to draw any public attention to the ‘ground truth’ work they were overseeing at the residential school sites that ended up the subject of all those shocking headlines,” wrote National Post columnist Terry Glavin in adetailed account last May of how the 2021 graves issue was misrepresented by Canadian and international media.

A notable exception, however, came in a series of resolutions adopted at the July 2021 annual general meeting of the Assembly of First Nations. T’kemlups Chief Casimir moved a successful motionthat referred to the discovery of the 215 suspected graves as a “mass grave.”

Resolution number 01/2021 stated “the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous peoples,” and called on Canadian authorities to establish a “verified list of all known locations of mass graves.”

It was this same resolution that called for an official apology by the Roman Catholic Church, which would be delivered by Pope Francis in a 2022 visit.

A second resolution moved by Casimir avoided the term “mass grave” in favour of “unmarked burial site,” but recommended that the International Criminal Court investigate the Kamloops site as a “crime against humanity.”

Nevertheless, it was two months before this AGM that one of the first mentions of the term “mass grave” came from The New York Times. The paper’s coverage of the T’kemlups surveycalled it a “mass grave of Indigenous children.”

In the weeks that followed, other international press reports would similarly misrepresent the four surveys, often framing them as confirmed, clandestine burials of dead children. “Over 600 bodies found at Indigenous school in Canada,” read theAssociated Press’s report on the Cowessess announcement. “Mass grave with remains of 215 children found at Indigenous school in Canada,” wrote USA Today. When a statue of Queen Victoria was pulled down by protest mobs in Manitoba, The Daily Beast said that it was an act of “rage” over “the discovery of mass graves for Indigenous children.”

In the wave of statue desecration and church vandalism that hit Canada in the spring of 2021, the term “dig them up” would become  ubiquitous graffiti. But First Nations nearest to the discoveries were often hesitant to move on to exhumation out of respect for their dead, and fears about igniting local traumas. T’kemlups, for one, has seen amassive community divide among members who want the 215 suspected graves exhumed, and those who want them left undisturbed.

“We all understand what it means to move the kids, to disturb them. There’s no one who doesn’t understand that,” T’kemlups representative Ted Gottfriedson said in May 2022 of the community’s decision to ultimately move forward with excavation. “There’s no manual for us to follow, so we’re taking things slow.”

None of the events of 2021 disturbed the core facts that Indian Residential Schools were designed to forcibly remove Indigenous children from their parents and assimilate them into white society in underfunded schools awash with corporal punishment and sexual predation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 final report found 3,201 confirmed student deaths, mostly due to disease — although the poor state of record-keeping led commissioners to conclude there was likely many more.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect the existence of a July 2021 motion from the Assembly of First Nations that referenced “mass graves.”

IN OTHER NEWS

In what may well rank as one of the more inadvisable foreign trips by a Canadian cabinet minister,Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault went to China. He is a member of a government facing down unresolved claims that they owe their re-election in part to unseemly Chinese meddling. And his ministry’s policies are spurring massive backlash at home, most notably with Atlantic Canadians abandoning the Liberal Party in droves following a recent hike to local carbon tax rates. But Guilbeault was in Beijing to attend a meeting of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, where he conspicuously avoided any criticism of Chinese emission policies, but delivered an interviewbashing Suncor for continuing to exploit the oil sands.

At the same time as provinces like B.C. are pushing to offer “safer supply” of hard opioids like hydromorphone,communities in the Canadian North still aren’t entirely comfortable with the idea of legal alcohol. The mayor and council of Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, have backed a petition to territorial authorities to close a beer and wine store that recently opened in the community. Mayor Harry Towtongietold CBC that alcoholism and disorder has utterly spiked in Rankin Inlet since the store opened. “The first responders, the RCMP, the nurses, mental health and anything to do with first responding is just overwhelming us right now and it’s burning out the system,” he said.

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