On May 27, it will have been four years since a small Indigenous band in British Columbia, Canada, announced that remains of 215 children had been discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. It has been nearly 10 years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report. The intervening years, however, have left most Canadians scratching their heads and asking the same querulous question as Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”

By some metrics, it appears Canada has ended the moral panic of the summer of 2021. Chief Rosanne Casimir later qualifyed that what had been identified by ground-penetrating radar technology were not 215 “remains” but 200 “potential burials.” Despite the provision of $12.1 million in Kamloops for field work and exhumation of remains, none have been recovered. 

In February 2025, the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools, Missing Children and Unmarked Burials was disbanded. That month, Parks Canada announced the site of the Kamloops school would become the fifth former Indian school to be designated a national historic site. Though it called the school the “largest institution in a system designed to carry out what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission described as cultural genocide” no mention was made of unmarked or mass graves. 

Even as the “not one body found” refrain echoed around the world, Canadian journalists, politicians and activists continue speaking as if it is still May 2021. During the recent federal election, the CBC issued a correction after its chief political correspondent, Rosemary Barton, said on air “there have been remains of Indigenous children found in various places across the country.”

A petition calling for the removal of Conservative candidate Aaron Gunn also garnered close to 20,000 signatures. His mistake was to state on social media that the residential school system did not constitute genocide.

The conversation has now shifted from mass graves, of which none have been found, to the criminalisation of  “residential school denialism,” which had its origins in June 2022 with the creation of the Office for the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools. 

Then Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti appointed Kimberly Murray, a lawyer, as special interlocutor. With a $10.4 million budget, the office had a mandate to identify legal barriers to the search of unmarked graves.

Murray said she expected to have conversations with survivors and Indigenous leadership around legal recourse over unmarked graves and suspected untimely deaths of children.

What started as the examination of legal frameworks to aid Indigenous communities in their search for so-called missing children, ended in the creation an entirely new “reparations” framework. 

In October 2024, after two and a half years of work, Murray released a two-volume report that focused more on denialism than the identification of unmarked graves. 

At the two-day National Gathering on Unmarked Graves where Murray presented her final report, there was a display of Indigenous objects: cradleboards, moccasins, and in the middle, a drum with the number “215” at the center. It was a curious choice. By 2024, Chief Casimir had long qualified that it was 200 “anomalies” not 215 “remains.” Yet Casimir sat on the very stage where the number was displayed front and center. 

I asked Noah MacDonald, Archdiocese of Toronto canon lawyer and member of the Michipicoten First Nation, why he thought the number 215 had moved beyond a data point to an emotive symbol.

“I see hanging onto those symbols and language because it's reminiscent of a moment in Canadian history when Indigenous people were believed,” he said. “The whole world paid attention to the million problems we've been trying to express.”

The report stresses the truth of residential schools is to be found solely in the memories of survivors, including accounts of babies conceived in rape being murdered.

“Survivors attest to the bodies of babies being placed in incinerators at Indian Residential Schools. These testimonies and oral history evidence hold veracity and truthfulness given the extent of corroboration and repetition among Survivors of the same institution and across many different Indian Residential Schools in the country.” 

When I asked MacDonald about this focus upon memory, rather than data, he responded that for many Indigenous communities it was important to focus less on the “implicit facts, but more on the spirit of truth.”

“Regardless of whether a baby was incinerated there, the souls and the persons of young Indigenous children were incinerated there, incinerated by this process of assimilation.”

On the fourth anniversary of the Kamloops announcement, it is the Pontius Pilate question that echoes through Canada. But if Canadians cannot agree on the meaning of “truth” as it applies to residential schools, how does reconciliation take place?