The Knowns and Unknowns of the Kamloops Burials
Poly Tics . Social Studies
Forward from Howard, June 7, 2022
When isn’t it tragic that any child dies under any circumstances, at any time, anywhere? They are always the most vulnerable and always the innocent victims of the crimes of adults. They are weaker, smaller and more susceptible to neglect, abuse, famine, disease, violence, sex trafficking, and any war crime that adults choose to wage against other adults. Children disappear. They are subject to the sickness and evil actions and desires of adults that do not discriminate. They will take their pleasure from any child regardless of race, color, religion or gender. Age doesn’t seem to be a barrier either, as long as the adult can hold and wield power over the younger – the weaker. Even the unborn aren’t safe. Sick, ‘progressive’ ideologies think nothing of killing the unborn and newly born alike. The body parts of the aborted are bought and sold to elite, psychopathic consumers, adrenochrome enthusiasts and pharmaceutical manufacturers. When lives in general are cheapened by those seeking to control them, the lives of children gain value.
When children suffer and die, the adults most responsible, especially politicians, will posture, kneel, wring their hands and clutch their pearls. They stand with and express their horror and sadness at the suffering and death of children. The dead children have greater value to these monsters in death than they did in life. The children have political capital. The virtue signalling politicians cash in on and freely spend this capital. Select flags are flown at half mast, little shoes, stuffy toys, orange flags, ribbons and clothing are displayed so that all might feel something whether it be guilt, sadness, or hopelessness. All must agree without question or comment and mourn or grieve in collective guilt, horror, and shame.
My mother and her sister and brother were nine, eleven, and twelve years old, during the second world war. They and countless other children were caught up in the systemic and chaotic horrors of war. They were forced to flee their simple homes and farms that were put to the torch in advance of armies. They slept in fields and ditches and rummaged through pillaged crops and gardens for food. They crawled into the cellars of burned out houses in search of any scrap that remained. They were always so painfully hungry. They lived in constant fear. Their parents did what they could among the countless number that were in similar circumstances. They watched a young mother raped by rogue soldiers after they threw her screaming baby out of a cattle car. They watched their father beaten to death for trying to intervene. They did not see their father buried by the Red Cross in a convenient but practical marked mass grave that still exists but does not bear his name. They had to keep moving. They became survivors of their ordeals during a war of adults only to live under the brutal oppression of Communism. There never were parades, public thoughts, prayers and vigils to honor and remember the dead children and certainly not for those that survived. No candles were lit. There were no politicians to wail, weep, and moan and signal their virtue for the cameras. These children of war were mere casualties of adult corruption, greed, arrogance, and global mental illness. Many could not be counted. They were obliterated by the machines of war or just disappeared. Victories were won and celebrated. The defeated and vanquished were forgotten except for the trotting out of the required guilt needed to keep the defeated and vanquished from making more war. Child capital was always available for special events. There were no public apologies or truth and reconciliation. These children had to grow up fast and take their place under the rule of adults that should have the greater capacity to be human. How many children died during the genocides of Nazi Germany, The Holomodor, The Armenian genocide, The Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the Cambodian Genocide? How many little bodies were dumped in these killing fields and mass graves?
More modern wars also took their toll on children. How many will remember the children of Beslan, Rwanda, Syria, Afghanistan, Mali, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Yemen, to name only a few of the failed states in constant war for power. How many will remember the little body of Alan Kurdy, washed up on the beach at Bodrum? Even there, the public outcry at the plight of Syrian refugees was used as political capital to support political agendas even after the story and images were proven to be staged and fake. Real or contrived, the suffering and death of children is used for political influence and gain.
Recent discoveries of abandoned graveyards near Canadian residential schools caused a political and media storm that went viral and took hold. It captured the horror and outrage of the world. Claims of genocide preceded any investigation. Retribution in the way of vandalism, the burning of churches and forests and homes. Arson, violence and threats of violence, was a form of terrorism that was tolerated and ‘understood’ by the Liberal and NDP governments. Their well funded legacy media outlets fanned the flames.
That the claims of genocide were not supported by respectful and thorough investigation is telling of the true intent of the ‘discovery’ and the events that followed. That the bodies detected underground were not carefully exhumed, identified, autopsied, and honorably and gently re-interred tells us more. ‘True’ and transparent truth and reconciliation is not of interest to the authorities that do not wish to talk of such things other than to gin up the politics of division and victim culture. They have moved on to other orders of business. What will the official response be to the mounting post vaccine injuries and death of children? What will this ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ sound and look like?
Aboriginal people the world over have suffered the benign neglect or outright discrimination by governments that failed to equitably introduce assimilation, self determination, even by introducing provinces or territories to accommodate such lofty goals of appeasement that involved little more than privileged white political pandering, cultural appropriation, and promises. Promises of potable water and sustainable infrastructure for their communities is perpetually more than the governments are prepared to give. The lands given back to First Nations People, minus mineral rights of course, offered little more than a place to return to self sustaining hunting and gathering which very view seem to be able to return to. Governments have failed to solve the riddle of what to do with or how to manage the people that were here first. They are human people nonetheless, with a rich cultural heritage meant to be part of Canada’s multicultural mosaic, just like everyone else who comes to Canada for a better life. Assimilation and integration isn’t working out too well for these newer Canadians either. The government has allowed for parallel societies to form a divide between Canadians and foster resentments and victimhood cultures among all people. This must be by design. No sane or honorable government would create division while proselytizing unity, equity, and equality. Meanwhile, it’s the children who suffer most.
THE ARTICLE:
May 24, 2022 Updated: May 24, 2022 – Epoch Times
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indian Residential Schools Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba.
Commentary
The announcement by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc indigenous band of Kamloops, B.C. on May 27, 2021, about finding remains of 215 children on the grounds of an Indian Residential School instantly became headline news worldwide, even though the band’s press release said that “At this time we have more questions than answers.”
Across Canada, the meagre information given was sufficient to provoke mournful vigils, flags on government buildings lowered to half-mast for months, statues of former Canadian heroes defaced and destroyed, and the destruction, vandalism, or desecration of some 70 churches whose denominations ran most of the schools.
Nearly all of Canada has accepted the claim made by the band based on ground-
penetrating radar (GPR) data as absolute truth: the mainstream media, the political class, the churches, the intelligentsia, and most ordinary Canadians.
The Kamloops school was alleged to have been a concentration camp, the burials evidence of a horrific crime, and the entire IRS system a heretofore hidden “Holocaust” or “final solution” wickedly perpetrated by Canada against its indigenous population.
But on the first anniversary of one of the most shocking announcements in Canadian history, there are even more questions than answers: Why was so much emphasis given to the results of the inconclusive technique called ground penetrating radar; why are new GPR searches planned for the same reserve when the details of the previous one have not been revealed; why were these GPR investigations given top priority when better sources of information are easily available; why has the site still not been excavated to uncover the physical remains; why did no reporter except one bother to visit the site to do some investigative journalism; and why were the potentially fallible spiritual “knowings” of indigenous knowledge keepers privileged over historical records located in school, church, and public archives?
None of these questions has even been asked, let alone answered, by the Kamloops band. Yes, it was confirmed four days after the press release that the band was “engaging with the coroner,” but this has gone nowhere. There was also early talk about exhuming the graves, but this hasn’t happened. As for the site being treated as a crime scene, the RCMP say they opened a file on the case, but there is no ongoing investigation.
Of all these unknowns, the leading one is never mentioned: the relationship between the unnamed children said to be buried in these graves and the named students listed as missing.
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), the successor to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has initiated the Missing Children Project documenting the deaths of children who perished while attending the schools but whose cause of death and place of burial are unknown. To date, 4,115 children who died while attending a residential school—but not necessarily at the school itself—are listed in a Memorial Register. It is unclear whether the NCTR believes that the unnamed children said to be buried in GPR-located graves are part of this number. They should not even be implicitly included because they are undocumented and unidentified.
Elementary logic supports this assertion: how can the turned subsoil, the only sign of burials detected by GPR, be called “the remains of missing children” when there are no proven human remains. And unnamed and unknown children cannot be called missing if they are known or believed to be dead.
The only three cemetery excavations already undertaken—the Shubenacadie IRS in Nova Scotia, the Battleford Industrial School in Saskatchewan, and the Camsell Hospital site in Alberta—have either produced negative results, confirmed that the bodies found were properly documented and buried IRS students, or predated the IRS system.
To address the link between the putative grave sites and Memorial Register names requires the transfer of attention from official unknowns to the growing body of unofficial but thoroughly documented evidence gathered since June 2021. None of this contrarian information supports the indigenous, legacy media, or political narratives.
Independently collected data for the Kamloops list of missing students posted on my website prove that 49 of the 51 “missing” Kamloops students were buried on their home reserves in named cemeteries.
All these data, along with information from many other reserves in British Columbia and elsewhere, were communicated months ago to the relevant parties: the media, provincial and federal politicians, indigenous leaders, and academics focusing on indigenous studies. Only a couple have bothered to even acknowledge receipt of this critical material.
So, who or what is buried in the Kamloops IRS apple orchard?
“Who” could be people who died before the school opened in 1890 because there are thousands of old abandoned graves and cemeteries scattered all over B.C. It is conceivable that some of these pre-1890 corpses may have been murder victims, but there is not a single authenticated case of a homicide at any IRS during their entire history. Not one.
As for the accusation that murdered children were buried in the apple orchard in the dead of night, elementary logic—as opposed to indigenous folktales—says that this is inconceivable. The school is not in some remote part of the province where nefarious deeds could easily take place. Rather, it is just across the river from the city of Kamloops. How could 215 children have been secretly buried with the whole of Kamloops and the entire Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc band turning a blind eye?
“What” is undoubtedly the likely determiner. It suggests that the remains of dead animals, decaying tree stumps neatly spaced in rows cemetery-fashion, and buried debris from construction projects are what was revealed by the GPR probe.
There is other indirect but critical evidence as well. No named indigenous relatives on the Kamloops reserve are frantically looking for named but missing IRS children. This is because admittance to the school demanded signed applications. Students were also minutely followed in quarterly reports from entry to exit as required for the school to receive its operating funds from Ottawa.
The dominance of traditional indigenous spirituality allowed a former Kamloops IRS student to recently claim that he wanted the alleged burial site left undisturbed. Exhumation would only prove what has already been established by GPR, he said. “The remains are there. What more proof do they want?”
Despite the student’s stand on this issue, thousands more children could easily be found in their final bureaucratically buried resting place: carefully preserved school, church, and government records. This would only happen if the relevant parties—the NCTR, indigenous activists, band leaders, curious journalists, impartial scholars, and family members—showed any interest in doing so.
So far, these parties prefer to support fruitless GPR studies that have not turned up a single “missing” body.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
OTHER ARTICLES OF INTEREST:
‘Biggest fake news story in Canada’: Kamloops mass grave debunked by academics
By: Dana Kennedy May 27, 20227:20am New York Post
https://nypost.com/2022/05/27/kamloops-mass-grave-debunked-biggest-fake-news-in-canada/
FIRST READING: Why much of what you heard about residential school graves is wrong
Tristin Hopper May 30, 2022 National Post
The Indigenous mass grave that wasn’t
Why didn’t the Canadian government wait for proof before sending the country into a tailspin of anger and anti-Christian violence?
Jane Stannus – The Spectator World January 21, 2022
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/native-mass-grave-wasnt-kamloops-canada/
Mass Graves At Canadian Residential School: False Story
Louis Baudoin-Laarman AFP Factcheck Nov. 1,2019
https://factcheck.afp.com/mass-graves-canadian-residential-school-false-story-unrelated-photo
Traditionally, the Canadian flag should never be hung upside down “except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property” according to the Canadian Code.
Typically, then, a flag would be hung upside down as a symbol that the country is under attack, but that isn’t the reason that some people have started hanging their flags upside down more recently. Canada is in distress and under attack by it’s government. The irony of the flag of it’s national broadcaster flying proudly at full mast is not lost.