There was much that was dark about residential schools, but no graves have been confirmed at Kamloops to this day

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Long before Stephen Harper’s Conservative government launched the multi-billion-dollar Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement that established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2007, it was already commonplace to refer to the legacy of those schools as a “dark chapter in Canadian history.”

There was much that was dark about the schools. Many of the church-run, federally-administered institutions, whatever the good intentions of the religious orders that ran them, were dark and forbidding places that incubated disease, cultural dislocation, abuse and despair, for much of their history. Roughly 150,000 children are believed to have attended the schools, which the federal government took over in the 1890s. Most Indigenous kids were attending day schools by the 1970s, but the last of the schools didn’t close their doors until 1996.

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Three years ago this week, another cliché entered the public lexicon. Derived partly from a kind of collective amnesia, a “long overdue reckoning” with the schools’ implications was the language almost universally employed to describe what ended up taking on the characteristics of an episode of national mass hysteria.

It began on May 27, 2021, when the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc chief Rosanne Casimir issued a press release announcing “an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented.” In the work of a ground-penetrating radar specialist, “the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

It was a Thursday. Immediately, headlines around the world picked up on the story. The New York Times set the tone, on the Friday: ‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada. Casimir hadn’t said anything about a mass grave, but the die was cast.

On Saturday, May 29, CTV’s Evan Solomon was peppering Assembly of First Nations national chief Perry Bellegarde: “How many mass graves might there be around residential schools? And what does that tell us? There could be untold numbers of children who were killed, that we don’t even know about. . . . Maybe they died, and they were buried in these mass graves, and they destroyed their records. How do we know?”

That evening CTV News was reporting shockwaves rolling across the country: “The discovery of the mass grave is gripping the nation tonight. . .” By then, Trudeau had already lowered........

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