Pope Francis's historic apology to Canada's native people in their homeland for abuses committed at Church-run residential schools has gained worldwide attention and respect.
However, Jacques Rouillard, professor emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Montreal, has raised questions about the validity of the evidence of mass graves. The ground penetrating radar may have detected something, but not necessarily burial grounds, he suggested in an article for the Dorchester Review.
More than a year later, no bodies have been discovered at the Kamloops site. It is not clear whether the graves said to have been discovered there actually exist.
The topic of the residential schools has come back into focus on the occasion of Pope Francis’ penitential pilgrimage to Canada. In apologizing for the Catholic Church’s role in operating Canada’s government-sponsored residential school system, he regretted the “cultural destruction and forced assimilation” inflicted on the indigenous people of the country. Indigenous children were taken from their families and forbidden to speak their native languages.
As a “starting point” the pope called for “a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered.”
Rouillard maintained that in the case of the Kamloops residential school, ground penetrating radar can tell us little about what is actually under the ground.
“By never pointing out that it is only a matter of speculation or potentiality, and that no remains have yet been found, governments and the media are simply granting credence to what is really a thesis: the thesis of the ‘disappearance’ of children from residential schools,” he wrote.
He noted that Sarah Beaulieu, the anthropologist who performed the initial radar testing, tried to rein in the media tsunami at a July 15, 2021 press conference.
“We need to pull back a little bit and say that they are ‘probable burials,’ they are ‘targets of interest,’ for sure,” Beaulieu had said, adding that the sites “have multiple signatures that present like burials,” but that “we do need to say that they are probable, until one excavates.”
“All of this is based only on soil abnormalities that could easily be caused by root movements, as the anthropologist herself cautioned,” Rouillard wrote.
In hindsight, the announcement of the results of the radar testing was made with a caveat. It was seen as a “preliminary” finding, yet the media and politicians ran with the story that mass graves were found at the site of a former residential school.