Aaron Pete: An Indigenous chief’s honest take on unmarked graves and residential school ‘denialism’ 

2025/08/29 Leave a comment

Of interest, synthesis rather than dichotomy:

…From my perspective as a First Nations Chief, the impending danger stemming from this recent experience is twofold. If mere skepticism is met with censorship, the accusation of being a residential school denier, or the stupidity of criminalizing critics, reconciliation risks becoming performative and brittle.

Meanwhile, if critics ignore the documented harms of residential schools, they alienate Indigenous people and trivialize generational trauma.

My own family’s history—my grandmother’s abuse at St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in B.C., her attempts to cope with the trauma through alcohol, and my mother’s fetal alcohol syndrome—reflects the long shadow of these institutions. These realities are not erased by asking for evidence about specific claims.

We should expect detailed public statements from Indigenous nations about potential graves to be supported by widely available public evidence, and met by a media that respectfully verifies the facts.

At the same time, Canadians skeptical of the Kamloops findings should grapple with survivor testimony and the TRC’s record, which make clear that many children never came home. Based on this Angus Reid polling, that’s exactly where most Canadians appear to be.i

Bridging the divide

The phrase “Truth and Reconciliation” begins with the word truth for a reason—reconciliation cannot survive selective truth-telling. Suppressing questions breeds mistrust. Downplaying history deepens wounds.

A healthier national conversation requires both transparency and empathy—recognizing the sovereignty of Indigenous nations while understanding that withholding evidence will leave some unconvinced. Canadians are ready for a more nuanced conversation: one that honours survivors’ pain, demands accuracy from media and politicians, and resists the urge to criminalize debate.

The truth about Kamloops may remain unresolved until excavation occurs. But the truth about residential schools—the abuse, the cultural erasure, the thousands of confirmed deaths—has been established beyond a reasonable doubt. If we can hold both facts in mind, we might replace mistrust with understanding and make reconciliation more than just a slogan.

Aaron Pete is a graduate of the Peter A. Allard School of Law at the University of British Columbia. He is also a council member with Chawathil First Nation, the manager of strategic relationships with Metis Nation British Columbia, and the host of the Bigger Than Me Podcast.

Source: Aaron Pete: An Indigenous chief’s honest take on unmarked graves and residential school ‘denialism’

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Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?

2025/03/01 Leave a comment

Valid question regarding lack of investigation and follow-up. Wouldn’t go as far as Kay calling it a “sacred myth”:

….No one has any idea what underground banalities gave rise to those 215 soil dislocations, because the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, as the Indigenous community in question is officially known, has refused to show anyone all of the data; and has now gone silent on the issue, after having pocketed more than $12-million CAD from the federal government, about $8-million of which was supposed to have been directed toward researching those supposed graves. The few reporters who’ve dared ask for more evidence have been denounced by activists as ghouls, and instructed that such inquiries represent a new form of colonial trauma.

The registered on-reserve population of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation comprises just 543 people. So the federal outlay works out to about $22,000 per person—enough to employ literally the entire community for many months to investigate graves that supposedly lie in precisely identified locations just a few feet from the earth’s surface.

But after four years, not a single grave has been found in Kamloops. It’s impossible to disprove the idea that one or more graves might be found at some point in the future. But the idea that there are 215 of them, much less that they contain murdered children, has become a grim farce.

Yet it is a very strange kind of farce, insofar as almost no public figure in Canada has had the courage to candidly revisit the apocalyptic pronouncements made during the initial unmarked-graves social panic of 2021.

During that period, the idea of these 215 little Indigenous martyrs being killed off by the priests and nuns who ran the Kamloops Indian Residential School became a sacred myth. And no one in the Canadian political and media establishment has any idea how to stand down from this myth now that it’s been debunked. Most members of polite society have simply stopped talking about it, apparently in hopes that the issue will fade into obscurity with the passage of time….

Source: Four Years. Zero Graves. Now What?

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