Facts are facts, in spite of what the New York Times has written on several occasions about unmarked graves of children on the grounds of Canada’s Catholic boarding schools.
No evidence of human remains have been found during the excavation of a Catholic church basement on the site of a former Manitoba residential school for indigenous students, according to the CBC.
Chief Derek Nepinak of Minegoziibe Anishinabe told social media accounts that a four-week excavation yielded nothing.
CBC had said that 14 “anomalies” were detected using ground-penetrating radar in the basement of the church on the site of the former Pine Creek Residential School last year. Those who had attended the school, who the CBC calls “survivors of the school,” had spoken about “horror stories” in the basement.
The tribe hired an archeological team from the University of Brandon to excavate this summer. The tribe had a pipe ceremony at the beginning of the dig, and built a “sacred fire” to “ensure elders, survivors and intergenerational survivors felt supported.”
According to the CBC, 150,000 indigenous children “were forced to attend residential schools,” with more than 60% of the schools run by the Cahtolic Church. Pine Creek school was run by the Roman Catholic Church between 1890 to 1969.
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation says it has a record of 21 child deaths at the school. But the idea that mass unmarked graves were at the site has been debunked, with no evidence found for such claims, raising concerns about the claims of the other supposed graves.
Previously the mainstream media went at length with the story that mass graves had been found not only in Manitoba but in Kamloops, British Columbia, at another school campus.
The elders of the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc also announced the discovery of a mass grave of more than 200 Indigenous children.
“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, said in a statement on May 27, 2021, according to media reports at the time.
But that site has never been excavated, nor have there been any dates set for an excavation. As with the Manitoba school, there were soil disturbances that the tribe speculates are unmarked graves. But that did not stop the New York Times and other media outlets from claiming that there were bodies.
Indigenous group said in 2021 that they discovered the remains of as many as 751 people, who they said were mainly indigenous children, on the grounds of the former Marital Residential School in Saskatchewan, which operated from 1898 to 1996. But there is scant evidence to support this claim since there have been no excavation. If true, it would average about 8 deaths per year over 98 years. No group has given substantiation to how many of supposed graves might be of children.
The National Truth and Reconciliation Commission says more than 4,100 students died while attending the schools, from neglect, abuse, and genocide. In many cases, families never saw their children again and were never told of their fate, according to families and survivors of the schools, which all closed in the late 1990s.
