I was slow in giving a close read to the long story by Patrick White and Willow Fiddler about the Tk’emlúps Residential School and residential school denialism that the Globe and Mail published on May 22. I think I was mostly put off by the Globe’s editorial on the matter, which seemed like straight-up encouragement to denialism.
But in the end it is a good piece of
journalism.
White and Fiddler make clear enough that apart
from a few ill-chosen words, the Tk’emlúps leaders mostly spoke carefully in
June 2021 about how the ground-penetrating radar showed anomalies that were
suggestive of graves. The article also states clearly that there is no doubt
about substantial numbers of children dying at residential schools (and their
remains being undocumented). It cites Canadian government documentation back to
the 1920s confirming the death rates. It notes cases like the Dunbow school in
Alberta where flooding in 1996 exposed (and carried away) many skeletal
remains.
That is, the story makes it plain there is
very good reason to assume that the “anomalies” at the Kamloops site are
exactly what everyone in 2021 assumed they were. Journalists who understood that the anomalies
could be taken as gravesites were not failing us when they drew plausible
conclusions.
The article might have been more clear about a
point of view I remember hearing in 2022:
that the Tk’emlúps people, while making it clear that they had no doubt what
the anomalies meant, had no great need or inclination to dig up what they
assumed to be the remains of their small friends and relatives for scientists to
stick on a shelf in some research lab for a century or so, in the name of
research. (It does at least cite one person calling such demands "morbid and unnecessary.")
The story makes it clear enough that Tk’emlúps
provides no serious basis for denying or minimizing the crimes and tragedies of
the residential school system, despite the denialists “bones or nothing happened”
approach to reconciliation. As is said in the article:
“I think a lot
of denialism’s roots go back to the fact that lots of these folks don’t want to
acknowledge or face the fact that atrocities happened to children,” said Manny
Jules, chief of Tk’emlúps through much of the 1980s and nineties.
The Globe’s editorial and self-criticism has given new fodder for denialists everywhere in their campaign to stop progress towards reconciliation. There is no reconciliation without truth, as the editorial says. But the fundamental truth remains: residential school kids died and were buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country.
