Too many people know full well that the data is being misrepresented and yet have failed to offer any correction

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When in February, Dallas Brodie, a British Columbia MLA, declared on X that the number of burials of missing children confirmed at the Kamloops Indian Residential School was “zero,” her fellow Conservative, Áʼa:líya Warbus, condemned her for “questioning the narratives of people who lived and survived … atrocities.” And the president of the Métis Nation of B.C., Walter Mineault, responded that the residential school experiences were “not objective truths for Métis people,” but their “lived experiences.”

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Well, no experience is raw; it’s always interpreted. And interpretations are based on perceptions that can be mistaken or distorted. To claim that only white people can misremember and fabricate would be racist. Racial equality requires, therefore, that we test Indigenous claims of “lived experience” against objective evidence, to find out if they’re true. Because they might not be.

So, what is the evidence about Canada’s residential schools?

On Kamloops, Brodie was quite correct: no graves of missing children have been discovered, because no disinterment has been attempted almost four years after the claim was first made. What we do know is that the alleged “mass grave” may be the site of a century-old septic system, whose trenches lined with clay tiles may match the direction and depth of the suspect “sub-surface anomalies” identified by ground-penetrating radar in 2021. There is no concrete evidence of hidden graves — either in Kamloops or anywhere else in Canada.

More generally, is it true that the residential schools were forced on Indigenous people? For most of their history, no. The residential school idea had the support of some Indigenous leaders, who recognized the need of kids in remote areas to adapt to the new world that had unavoidably come upon them, by learning English and agriculture. As late as the 1920s, Indigenous bands in Alberta and in the Northwest Territories were lobbying for more such schools. Parents had to apply in writing for their children to attend, since boarding was over three times more expensive than day school. And 50 per cent of Indigenous kids left both day and residential schools after Grade 1. In short, admission was only at parental request and exit was at will.

It is true that in 1920, the authorities acquired the legal power to compel attendance, but........

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