The third anniversary of the May 27, 2021 announcement by B.C.’s Kamloops Indian Band that the unmarked graves of 215 children were found on the site of its Indian residential school has come and gone but its claims are very much alive.

According to Grand Chief Stewart Phillip, president of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, May 27 will remain “deeply disturbing” for him because “There isn’t a single public school in Canada or in the United States that features a graveyard out back next to the football field” and “Residential schools were a very brutal tool of genocide in an effort to deal with the Indigenous presence in this country.”

Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Roseanne Casimir also insists: “Three years later, we remain steadfast in our sacred duty as guardians to the missing children from the Kamloops Indian

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Residential School. From the beginning, we have articulated and exercised our jurisdiction.”

While Grand Chief Phillip’s and Chief Casimir’s assertions may resonate within an Indigenous framework, they have no credibility using scientific systems of truth telling.

Contrary to Grand Chief Phillip’s claims, there never were any Indian residential school graveyards exclusively dedicated to the burial of its students. The mission churches on the reserves that preceded the residential school era had adjoining cemeteries for community laity and clergy, which later became part of a “church, boarding school, hospital and cemetery complex” for all members of the faith.

Phillip’s assertion of genocide also has no credibility. There is not a single proven example of students being murdered by a staff member at any residential school during the 113 years of government funding and oversight.

Casimir’s charge that “federal

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laws ripped our children away from home, in cattle trucks and police cars, to bring them to the residential schools” is equally false: Only orphans and neglected youngsters were forced to attend these schools. As for the rest, their parents or guardians were required to sign admission forms to ensure their acceptance.

Elementary logic — as opposed to Indigenous memory — says it’s inconceivable “boys attending Kamloops Indian Residential School (were) woken in the middle of the night, and asked to dig holes that seemed like graves, in the dark, and not being told why,” as Casimir has claimed. The school was not in some remote part of the province where nefarious deeds could easily have taken place. It was right across the river from the city of Kamloops and received a constant stream of visitors, including the parents of students. How could 215 children have been secretly buried with the whole of Kamloops and the entire Kamloops band and school’s Indig- enous workers turning a blind eye?

As for Casimir’s claim of her band’s jurisdiction over the search for the alleged buried children, if the local detachment of the RCMP believed that criminal behaviour resulted in the death and internment of their remains, such jurisdiction would never have been transferred to Indigenous investigators because doing so could have easily have led to a charge of a dereliction of duty, if not criminal conspiracy, against the police themselves.

In what looks like justification for the absence of human remains at the dozens of former residential school sites where GPR soil disturbances were found, another post-anniversary claim came from head of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, Chief Terry Teegee, who suggested the bodies residential school “victims” may never be found because they were incinerated: “some of these residential schools or institutions had incinerators so there could (sic) be any potential of finding any remains.”

Chief Teegee said he’s not sure how “victims” will ever be known due to a lack of proper record keeping by school authorities and provincial governments. This is an erroneous assertion given that students were meticulously tracked to ensure their funding.

Such iron garbage drums, still commonly used for burning refuse across the globe, couldn’t be further from the Nazi incinerators employed to burn the remains of millions of Holocaust victims between 1941 and 1945.

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Promoted by aboriginal knowledge keepers, aided and abetted by a compliant federal government consumed by the soft bigotry of low Indigenous expectations masquerading as respect for “Indigenous knowings,” and constantly publicized by a compliant and incurious mainstream media, tales like this reveal that the misguided search for missing children is still very much alive.

(Hymie Rubenstein is a retired University of Manitoba anthropology professor.)