The Kamloops Residential School: Remembering a Tragedy

We must acknowledge the remains of 215 kids (some as young as three) found on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School in BC – once the largest such institution in Canada – all located in unmarked graves, and recently discovered using radar technology.  The school opened in 1890 and closed in 1978. Yes, this represents a profound tragedy, certainly a significant number when considered at once, but they were not “mass graves” a term some in the media and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh are prone to using.  This is not necessarily a “genocide”, a word that has been bandied about ever since Beverly McLaughlin, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, gave it sanctity using the term “cultural genocide”, following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Should the RCMP (which to date maintains a poor relationship with the Indigenous) have been called in to investigate, as some have wondered on CBC Radio?

On the one hand there is too much present-day thinking going about, and by that I mean we judge the past by the standards of today.  Today we talk about justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, in other words postcolonial thinking where empathy reigns supreme, hence Justin Trudeau’s plethora of apologies - and now, of course, official recognition by means of flag lowering.  He only just apologized for the Second World War internment of Italian-Canadians, a move motivated in part by Liberal electioneering prospects.  This is despite the fact that some 3,000 Italian-Canadians were card-carrying Mussolini-supporting Fascists, according to York University historian, Roberto Perrin.

On the other hand, we forget that the entire planet is right now in the middle of a pandemic, and these children could easily have died from TB, diphtheria, measles, or other infectious diseases.  Advances in modern medicine – and access to it - are, well, recent, and death in general was in days of old far more prevalent. For example: about 15 times the number of people died of the Spanish Flu that followed the First World War than have died so far from Covid-19, at least in part because we now have the science of immunology.  Moreover, the attitude towards death is different today in Canada than in the past.  All those soldiers who died in Afghanistan were welcomed and memorialized along the “Highway of Heroes” in Ontario.  Such individuated recognition was not possible – even unthinkable - during Canada’s previous wars.   

This was a Residential school run by Catholic missionaries, so I would not discount the possibility that some of these interred children were abused.  We lack sufficient evidence here, but we do have the other Indigenous testimonies, such as that of Augie Merasty, whose account of abuse – including sexual abuse, as I have said elsewhere  – is just not comparable with Jewish memories of Auschwitz. But it is a fact that some children did run away from Residential school only to die of hunger or exposure, for example Chanie Wenjack, now viewed as a resistance figure, whose fate prompted an inquest into the Residential system.  At least 3,200 children died while at in Residential school, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015; if the Kamloops school is any indication the figure is much higher.

Do Canada’s Indigenous live in a system of apartheid?  The answer is yes.  But to call the discovery of these children’s remains evidence of a “Holocaust”, a “genocide”, or a “crime against humanity” is to fall prey to popular culture, a weak vocabulary - and the news cycle.  Black Lives Matter – moved by George Floyd’s death - has, of late, melded with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation, such that both The Globe and Mail and CBC Radio have recently featured stories of miscegenation between Blacks and the Indigenous.  But no one is talking about mixed-race results between the Indigenous and the Chinese, and still less the Blacks and the Chinese.  Ask yourself, why?

The more multicultural – and postcolonial - Canada becomes, the more it presumably will adjust to Reconciliation with the Indigenous, but multiculturalism in itself is no panacea for racism.  Given that the nineteenth-century Indian Act made the Indigenous Peoples “wards of the state ”, the Canadian state must in the end be held accountable for what happened in Residential schools, which were in themselves an abuse. I suggest that the Kamloops grounds be preserved - and the remains identified, if possible, for the purposes of Reconciliation. To be Canadian today is to be keenly aware of the Other. As many cultures in one country we continue to exhume past pains with the aim of bettering the lives of our fellow peoples - including the fallen children, who deserved far more.