The Courage to Dig

Here’s a salute to the Indigenous leaders searching for those infamous ‘unmarked graves.‘ Unlike Canada’s white media and political establishment, they want the truth, wherever it leads them.

Pine Creek Chief Derek Nepinak

It’s been exactly 29 months since the Canadian media exploded with claims that 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous children had been discovered on the site of a former church-run boarding school in Kamloops, British Columbia. As the summer of 2021 progressed, similarly sensational claims were made about other sites—and the media-trumpeted tally of dead Indigenous children entered the thousands. As I’ve reported for Quillette and Britain’s Critic, Canada entered a collective months-long paroxysm of grief and guilt, capped by Justin Trudeau lowering flags on federal buildings for more than five months.

It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that no actual proof of the graves’ existence had yet been produced; just ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data indicating soil dislocations that might indicate human burials.

At the time, no one was in the mood for such caveats. Canada’s residential schools—which were attended by about 150,000 Indigenous children, in many cases against their family’s wishes—are known to have meted out all sorts of abuses. Death rates from tuberculosis and other diseases were high. Surely, many assumed, these priests and ministsers were also morally capable of perpetrating the outright murder of Indigenous children and casting their bodies into shallow graves. This horror movie was the lurid narrative that Canada’s media and political class settled on in mid-2021.

And it was only the beginning. Soon, Canadians were led to believe, actual human remains would be lifted from the earth—child martyrs whose suffering symbolized the barbarous cruelty of the Canadian colonial state.

Slogans were minted. T-shirts were sold. Hundreds of millions of dollars in new grants were sent to Indigenous communities. Trudeau himself, always in his element when things get overwrought, went down on one knee and placed a teddy bear on the site of a former residential school.

As noted above, this happened almost two and a half years ago. Yet during that time, not a single actual grave has been discovered, much less anything in the way of human remains.

This is not to say that some graves won’t be found. Indeed, it would be surprising if the grounds of some of these old schools, which typically featured churches and graveyards, did not have unpleasant surprises to surrender. But by now it is clear that the hysterical (and that is the right word) media claims of 2021, which suggested vast swathes of corpse-filled killing fields, were the product of unchecked herd behaviour among Canada’s intellectual class.

Even now, in fact, few of the leading figures who fed this hysteria have gone back to correct their flawed statements, much less investigate how their fact-checking processes allowed it all to happen. (A notable exception here is the National Post newspaper, which published a full and frank piece on this subject by columnist Terry Glavin in 2022.)

As for Justin Trudeau’s government, is has become so vested in the fable that thousands of real child graves have been discovered and confirmed, that it is even mulling the creation of an (ill-defined) law against “denialism.” If such a law were actually enacted, the list of jailbirds would be extremely long. In fact, it would include not a few Indigenous leaders, for they are the only people who actually have the courage to put the unmarked-graves narrative to the test with shovels and backhoes.

Those leaders deserve our respect. They know, when they embark on such searches, that if they come up empty (which is indeed what is happening), this result will embarrass many of the same political allies who originally convinced Canadians that there are bodies to be found.

I have no special insight into why the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, which made the first unmarked-graves announcement in May 2021, hasn’t yet investigated those 215 radar-identified soil dislocations. When this question is raised in the media, one often hears it vaguely said that the ceremonial and technical challenges associated with such a dig would take many years—which is of course ridiculous. McGill University recently performed a complex search for Indigenous remains on its campus, under the watchful eye of Indigenous cultural monitors, in a matter of months.

It should be said that, in the period that followed the original Kamloops announcement, other First Nations tended to be more guarded in announcing their own radar-located ground “anomalies.” Over time, many Canadians had educated themselves on the limitations of GPR technology, which typically cannot identify actual graves (much less bones or bodies), but simply picks up soil dislocations that can be associated with graves, yes, but also with irrigation pipes, drainage ditches, and tree roots.

One of the first Indigenous communities to actually start digging has been Pine Creek First Nation in Manitoba, whose lands include the site of the (long ago demolished) Pine Creek Indian Residential School. Former students at the school, which operated between 1890 and 1969, claimed to remember bodies of dead children being stored in the basement of the school’s church, as well as secretive burials outside—the same sort of dark legends that had circulated in Kamloops.

The search at Pine Creek’s former church was thorough, and centred on fourteen radar anomalies located in the church basement. On August 18, Pine Creek Chief Derek Nepinak announced to his community that nothing was found during this search. There were no graves, no bodies, no human remains. (The community still hasn’t decided whether it will pursue an investigation of the other GPR-identified anomalies, which lie outside the church.)

On social media, some have seized on this news, suggesting that it “proves” the whole unmarked-graves narrative was always a “hoax.” But language like that is inaccurate, unhelpful, and arguably even cruel—because there is no evidence (at least none that I’ve seen) indicating that the unmarked-graves social panic was any kind of deliberate con. Just the opposite, it seems to have originated organically from a stew of historical fact (yes, many of the residential schools were cruel and dangerous places), urban legends (no, they were not concentration camps), and performative white guilt (starting at the top, with Trudeau himself, who clearly saw political currency in the maudlin extremes of his reaction).

Certainly, no one can credibly accuse Chief Derek Nepinak of bad faith: Not only did he mobilize his community to search for human remains, but he even invited journalists to come watch it happen. And he did it knowing full well that finding nothing would run up against the grain of media-fuelled expectations, and perhaps even serve to raise pressures on other First Nations that have made announcements concerning their own GPR-identified anomalies.

Since the original unmarked-graves narrative centered on Indigenous people, it is proper that it is Indigenous people who are now taking steps to put the associated claims to the test. And as they do so, we should take a moment to consider the difficult position they’ve been put in because of the way this story was originally overplayed. They deserve our respect for their willingness to search for the truth on this issue, regardless of where it leads—which is a lot more than can be said for pretty much everybody else in Canada.