False Reports
"THESE FALSE REPORTS induced the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to portray the situation as “a large scale human rights violation.” The UN urged Canadian authorities and the Catholic Church to conduct “thorough investigations into the discovery of a mass grave containing the remains of over 200 children” — again before a single verified body had been exhumed.[6] Amnesty International is demanding that the persons and institutions responsible for the “remains” that had been “found” in Kamloops be prosecuted.[7]
"It was certainly ironic that China of all countries — itself probably the greatest human rights abuser in history — called for an investigation into human rights violations against the Indigenous people in Canada at the UN Human Rights Tribunal in June 2021. This demand was required just before Canadian officials read a statement to allow the UN human rights chief access into Xinjiang to investigate the unlawful detention of over one million Uyghur Muslims. Trudeau responded that Canada had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but that “China is not recognizing even that there is a problem.”[8]
"The supposed perpetrators of this “crime” are also making excuses: governments, religious communities, the Conference of Catholic Bishops. In June Pope Francis expressed his pain for “the shocking discovery in Canada of the remains of 215 children” at Kamloops,[9] and in an exceptional gesture promised to come to Canada. Aboriginal leaders are demanding a formal apology and some (including Rosanne Casimir) that the church provide more compensation for survivors.[10] To find out the truth about unmarked graves, the Canadian government made available in June an envelope of $27 million to “to identify and delineate burial sites, and returning remains home if desired.”[11]
"By never pointing out that it is only a matter of speculation or potentiality, and that no remains have yet been found, governments and the media are simply granting credence to what is really a thesis: the thesis of the “disappearance” of children from residential schools. From an allegation of “cultural genocide” endorsed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) we have moved to “physical genocide,” a conclusion that the Commission explicitly rejects in its report.[12] And all of this is based only on soil abnormalities that could easily be caused by root movements, as the anthropologist herself cautioned in the July 15 press conference.
"According to another anthropologist, Scott Hamilton, who has worked on residential school cemeteries for the TRC between 2013-2015, one must be very careful with the use of ground-penetrating radar because the soil may have been disturbed over the years by "sedimentary texture, ... culturally-derived unconformities, obstructions or voids."[13] A project to test the soil with the same method at the Brandon Residential School in Manitoba, which began in 2012 and was re-launched in 2019, has not yet yielded any conclusive results. In June, the research team works to identify 104 potential graves and still needs to consult the residential school's archives and interview survivors.[14]"
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