The Canadian government has halted an inquiry into claims of mass burials of children at former Church-run residential schools – after not one grave was discovered.
Claims of the abuse and murders of hundreds indigenous children have triggered arson attacks, vandalism and the desecration of about 120 churches across Canadaamid an outpouring of national grief.
The Canadian government set up the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools, Missing Children and Unmarked Burials to investigate the claims and the full extent of the alleged abuse and murder of Indian children by Christians of European extraction.
But after three years of searching for bodies, at the cost of $216.5 million, not a single set of human remains have been found.
The government has now quietly withdrawn funding for the investigating committee and will disband it at the end of this month.
Crystal Gail Fraser, a member of the committee, described the move as “betrayal” in spite of the failure to find any corroborating evidence of murder.
“We are losing sight of our values around truth and reconciliation,” she told CBC news.
Hysteria broke out in 2015 with the claim that 215 burial sites had been discovered at Kamloops Indian Residential School by ground-penetrating radar scans.
Although subsequent searches yielded no bodies, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed in public, even as late as last year that murders had taken place.
The schools, run mostly by Catholic and Anglican churches and funded by the government, were founded to educate Indian children from the late 19th century until the 1990s.
Some children died at the schools but records showed such deaths was mostly from such diseases as tuberculosis.
In spite of evidence to the contrary many Canadians remain reluctant to admit that the allegations have been proven unfounded.
Regent College, an evangelical graduate school on the University of British Columbia campus, for instance cancelled a public lecture, due to go ahead this Thursday, by Lord Biggar, a British Anglican vicar and distinguished historian, after students called him a residential schools apologist and “mass graves denier”.
In response to his cancellation, Lord Biggar accused the college of “aiding and abetting the continuing reign of an aggressively repressive culture in Canada, which is invested in a story that thoroughly and unfairly discredits the work of Christian missions and justifies the razing to the ground of dozens of Christian churches”.
(Photo by NICHOLAS RAUSCH/AFP via Getty Images)
