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Tristin Hopper: Kamloops residential school 'graves' could have been septic pipes all along

Five years after the explosive announcement of 215 children's graves, the only way to know what's under the ground is to excavate.

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Less than two months after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc issued the explosive announcement on May 27, 2021 that they’d uncovered the “remains of 215 children” at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, they hosted a press conference admitting that they’d gotten the number wrong.

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At the time, flags were half-masted across the country, and would remain so into November. News outlets around the world were reporting that Canada had uncovered a whole field of dead missing children. The figure “215” had been emblazoned across countless memorials and solidarity statements.

Tristin Hopper: Kamloops residential school 'graves' could have been septic pipes all along Back to video

It had also been a feature of several vandalism attacks targeting Christian churches. Before a mob pulled down a Toronto statue of Egerton Ryerson, they first spray-painted it with the moniker “215.”

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Just the week prior to the press conference, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir had introduced resolutions at the Assembly of First Nations calling the discovery a “mass grave” and citing it as evidence of a “genocide inflicted upon Indigenous Peoples by the State in partnership with the churches.”

But now, on July 15, 2021, news media were told that there were actually 15 fewer suspected graves than initially reported.

Sarah Beaulieu, the ground-penetrating radar technician whose report had yielded the initial 215 figure, said she had since received information that her survey had accidentally counted a series of prior archaeological digs.

Between 1991 and 2004, land surrounding the former Kamloops Indian Residential School had been excavated by a Simon Fraser University team. The work involved digging “shovel test pits” and then screening the soil for bone tools, fire pits and other evidence of pre-contact Indigenous use.

And apparently, some of those test pits had been incorrectly pinged as suspected graves.

“I had to rule out where those excavations had taken place in the late 90s, early 2000s,” said Beaulieu. “After this review it was determined that there remain 200 targets of interest.”

Unmentioned at the two-hour press conference was the arguably far more relevant information that the area of the Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds they had surveyed also lay atop a historic septic system.

In fact, the survey site may have been overtop the system’s “disposal beds,” a structure consisting of a latticework of clay pipes, installed in 1926 and laid out........

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