Five years after the Kamloops “graves” controversy first erupted, and with zero bodies discovered, First Nations chiefs are pushing hard to make residential school denialism an imprisonable offence.
But Canadians should not have to face up to two years in jail for denying what the chiefs describe as their “truth.” Are we only to speak about the horrors of residential schools, or will survivors with “warm memories” face prison?
The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) has passed an emergency resolution that calls on Canada to criminalize residential school denialism.
The advocacy organization, which represents chiefs countrywide, is holding its annual general assembly in Ottawa this week. The resolution was passed on Tuesday.
First Nations chiefs spoke about the importance of the resolution at a news conference Wednesday.
In its May 30 mea culpa, the Globe and Mail’s editorial board came clean and confessed that the newspaper’s reporting of the May 27, 2021, Kamloops graves “discovery” announcement was journalism at its worst.
The newspaper — finally, after five years — admitted it did no homework, asked no questions, and acted merely as a stenographer for the Kamloops Indian band, which, on that “day that lives in infamy,” announced it had discovered the bodies of 215 indigenous children indecently interred in the apple orchard near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
On May 27, 2021, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced the supposed discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at a Native American residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Specifically, Chief Rosanne Casimir claimed the discovery of the “remains of 215 children.”
Canada convulsed in horror. Flags were lowered to half-mast for five months straight. One First Nation group after another came forward claiming they had discovered hundreds more unmarked graves. At one site in Saskatchewan where it was claimed 751 children had been found buried, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau placed a teddy bear in memorial of the children. The government threw $320 million into a “Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund.”
Canada’s residential school hoax is making us world famous.
Exactly five years ago last weekend, the man now known as Mr Katy Perry — but then known as the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau — ordered that the flags be lowered to half-mast on all Canadian federal buildings. This was out of respect for the indigenous children who had died in the country’s residential schools that were government-funded and run by Christian churches from the 19th century to the late 20th century. Thousands of unmarked graves for those children had just been discovered, it was reported, forcing the country into, to use the lingo of the time, a racial reckoning. Horrifying claims emerged: that priests had beheaded children; that nuns had forced children to bury babies; that during a 1964 visit to Kamloops Residential School, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip had invited children on a picnic who were never seen again.
Five years of national angst and anger over the “discovery” of “graves” at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School was driven by an archeological report by a self-proclaimed activist archeologist and critical theory advocate Sarah Beaulieu. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2019, glorified her social warrior/critical theory credentials.
In her thesis, Archaeology of Internment at the Morrissey WWI Camp, insight into Beaulieu’s philosophy is revealed in chapter two under the headings “Critical Theory” and “Applications of Critical Theory within Modern Conflict Archaeology.”
On May 30, the Globe and Mail editorial board issued a mea culpa, titled “There is no reconciliation without truth,” attesting to the newspaper’s failure to meet professional standards on an important national story. Ironically, for a piece centred on journalistic shortcomings, this defensive editorial not only itself contains significant journalistic shortcomings, but fails to deliver the only conclusion that merits genuine approval.
Five years ago, a moral panic gripped Canada over a story that was obviously fake but that so perfectly confirmed the biases of anti-Catholic liberals, no one in the media or the political establishment bothered to check its veracity.
This of course was the hoax about the purported discovery of “mass graves” of indigenous children at what was once a government boarding school run by the Catholic Church. In late May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation claimed that ground-penetrating radar had revealed hundreds of graves near the site of a former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Tribal leaders cited the radar survey as proof that scores of indigenous Canadian children had been buried in unmarked mass graves at the school.
A hoax costs taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and appears to incite arson attacks against dozens of churches.
No, this isn’t the latest headline out of Minnesota — look a little further north.
In 2021, at a time when media throughout the Western world were still in a state of agitation after the killing of George Floyd, Canadian outlets picked up a story too sensational not to be true …
To begin with, I want to thank Real Story subscribers for their patience. As I mentioned on Victoria Day, my absence from the National Post and from this newsletter over the past while was due to the work required in putting together a 3,000-word assessment of the damage done by the mass psychosis that afflicted this country on the last weekend in May, 2021.
It’s out now. Some of it may come as a bit of a shock, although perhaps not to paying Real Story subscribers who read this newsletter’s contents beyond the occasional paywalls.
Two things can be true, at the same time. Five years after the startling announcement that there were hundreds of possible unmarked graves near a residential school in Kamloops, B.C., there has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains. That is reality, one reality.
Another is this: 3,200 Indigenous children, at least, died at residential schools, according to the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Residential school students died at a rate far higher than children in the rest of Canada – a negligence so deep-rooted that it came “within unpleasant nearness” of manslaughter, according to a government official in the early 1900s.
Canada’s newspaper of record says Oops.
Holy shit. @globeandmail editorial board:
“The fact of the crimes committed against Indigenous children at residential schools over many decades does not automatically validate claims that hundreds of students were dumped into unmarked graves in Kamloops and other residential… https://t.co/ctwF8Z0InA
— Harrison Lowman (@harrisonlowman) May 30, 2026
In the past five years, the Survivors’ Secretariat in Six Nations has acquired over 36,000 records related to children who attended the Mohawk Institute Residential School, according to secretariat lead Laura Arndt.
The Survivors’ Secretariat, a non-profit survivor-led organization, has been investigating the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ont., Canada’s longest-running residential school, since 2021.
Arndt said despite accessing thousands of records through archives using access to information requests, privacy law restricts them from sharing those with families of survivors or lost children.
It’s been exactly five years since the shocking accusation that the remains of 215 students had been discovered on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which triggered a wave of church arsons, starting in British Columbia and spreading like wildfire across the country. While the spike has abated, churches are still burning, and almost nothing has changed. Worse, it’s not even clear that the hate directed towards churches is fuelled only by the Kamloops announcement.
Five years ago Canada was sold a narrative so emotionally charged that it changed this country for the worse.
Truth has been twisted out of proportion, people’s lives have been devastated, hundreds of millions of dollars wasted and all based on a spurious investigation that hoodwinked the nation.
A month ago, I offered some predictions about how Canadian journalists would cover the five-year anniversary of the country’s infamous “unmarked graves” social panic, which began on May 27, 2021. On one hand, this kind of important landmark would be difficult for news outlets to ignore. (After all, this was considered the Canadian “Story of the Year” at the time.) On the other hand, any intellectually honest retrospective that these outlets produced would require at least some passing explanation as to why the entire Canadian media establishment had fallen hook, line, and sinker for a story that turned out to be fake—something that most journalists have so far proven unwilling to do.
This is the Globe piece – Where the truth is buried in Tk’emlúps
