“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, noted in a statement issued on May 27, 2021.
The New York Post reports, however, that the 'discovery' turns out to likely have been a hoax all along:
The band called the discovery, “Le Estcwicwéy?” — or “the missing.”
What’s still missing, however, according to a number of Canadian academics, is proof of the remains in the ground.
Since last year’s announcement, there have been no excavations at Kamloops nor any dates set for any such work to commence. Nothing has been taken out of the ground so far, according to a Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman.
The alleged burial site, which supposedly contains 215 bodies -- some as young as three years old -- was supposedly found with the assistance of ground-penetrating radar at the location of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, which was open between 1890 and 1978 and was operated by the Catholic Church.
The number of bodies was ascertained based on readings of irregularities in the ground picked up by radar waves, an anthropologist hired by the Indigenous tribe to scan the site noted.
"Kamloops was one of a network of residential schools across Canada run by the government and operated by churches from the 1880s through the end of the 20th century. Experts say an estimated 150,000 children attended the schools," The Post continued.
According to the website of the First Nations and Indigenous Studies of the University of British Columbia: “The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages."
As readers can imagine in this day and age of hyper-exploitative behavior by the left, the news -- and the way it was portrayed (mass murder of tribal children) -- shocked the country and the world. Within a few days, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, always quick to score political points, decreed, in part at the request of tribal leaders, that all flags on federal buildings fly at half-mast. Meanwhile, the Canadian and provincial governments pledged some $320 million to fund additional research and in December pledged $40 billion more for First Nations child-welfare claim settlements that partially compensated some attendees of the residential school. Pope Francis formally apologized on behalf of the Church, which operated many of the residential schools for nearly a century and asked for God's forgiveness. He also announced plans to travel to Canada later this year to assist further in healing and reconciliation.
However, a group of about a dozen or so academics in Canada isn't buying the whole story.
“Not one body has been found,” Jacques Rouillard, who is a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post. “After …months of recrimination and denunciation, where are the remains of the children buried at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?”
Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc spokesman Larry Read confirmed to the outlet earlier this week that no bodies have yet been exhumed from the Kamloops school and no dates have been set to start the process. He also said that the ground-penetrating radar report that allegedly located the bodies has yet to be released by the tribe but that it may be at some future point.
The Post added:
Rouillard, who first made his case for what he said was a total lack of evidence for the mass graves in a January essay, doesn’t deny that serious abuses may have occurred at residential schools.
But he and others question the highly-charged narrative about Kamloops school that includes children being murdered and buried in what some past school attendees say was an apple orchard.
“They use a lot of words like ‘cultural genocide,’” Rouillard told The Post. “If that’s true, there should be excavations. Everything is kept vague. You can’t criticize them. Canadians feel guilty so they keep quiet.”
Tom Flanagan, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, isn’t buying the story, either.
“This is the biggest fake news story in Canadian history,” Flanagan told The Post. “All this about unmarked graves and missing children triggered a moral panic. They have come to believe things for which there is no evidence and it’s taken on a life of its own.”
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