It has been four years since a small Indigenous Band in British Columbia, Canada announced that the remains of 215 children had been discovered on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (IRS). It has been nearly 10 years since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its final report. The intervening years, however, have left most Canadians scratching their heads and asking the same querulous question as Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?”
By some metrics, it might appear that Canada has moved on from the moral panic that followed the bombshell press release. Chief Rosanne Casimir would later qualify that what had been identified by ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology were not 215 “remains” but 200 “potential burials;” despite the provision of $12.1 million for field work and exhumation of remains, no remains have ever been recovered.
