Tom Flanagan: Still no bodies 5 years after Kamloops ‘mass burial site’ was announced

A wreath is placed on the stage at the Snye in memory of the 215 children whose bodies were found at a Kamloops residential school. Photo by Laura Beamish/For McMurray Today/Postmedia Network

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May 27, 2026, is the fifth anniversary of the announcement from the Kamloops First Nation, in which Chief Rosanne Casimir told us that ground penetrating radar (GPR) had located 215 previously unknown graves containing the remains of missing Indigenous children.

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Media, politicians, and academics uncritically accepted the story. The New York Times even amplified it by speaking of a “mass burial site,” making it sound like the outcome of a civil war. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered the Canadian flag to be flown at half-mast on federal buildings for almost six months, an unprecedented display of public mourning. MP Leah Gazan persuaded the House of Commons to vote that the Indian Residential Schools constituted a genocide. The resolution had no legal effect, but the impact on public opinion was substantial.

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Despite all the hype, the Kamloops narrative began to fall apart almost immediately. Sarah Beaulieu, the Kamloops GPR operator, cautioned that excavations would be necessary to confirm the findings because GPR could discover soil anomalies but not identify what was underground. An alternate explanation for the 215 soil anomalies emerged when it was re-discovered that the Kamloops Indian Residential School had installed a sewage disposal system in the 1920s with thousands of feet of weeping tile in the area where unmarked graves were allegedly found.

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Difficulties continued to pile up. Independent researchers found death certificates showing the place of burial for almost all students who died while attending the Kamloops school. So, who were these missing children? No one came forward with the names of children who had disappeared. In any case, the claim was implausible because both the Indian Affairs bureaucracy in Ottawa and the school administrations kept detailed lists of all students. The schools were supported by per capita payments, so they wanted to ensure they got all the money to which their enrolment entitled them, while officials in Ottawa wanted to ensure they didn’t overpay.

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On the third anniversary of the Kamloops announcement, the First Nation’s leaders threw in the towel, admitting that what had been found were not graves but soil anomalies that might be potential grave sites. But the Kamloops narrative has acquired a life of its own and is now embedded in the minds of true believers.

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Earlier this month, we also learned that a CBC-affiliated comedy series called Northland Tales conducted an elaborate hoax, attempting to embarrass several high-profile critics of the Kamloops narrative, such as academic Frances Widdowson, B.C. MLA Dallas Brodie and MP Aaron Gunn. Should public money be spent to trash the reputations of people who take one side in a public debate?

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The CBC sting operation was obviously a hoax, but was the Kamloops narrative a hoax in the same sense of being a deliberate deception? Some think so, but I don’t. I believe it was confirmation bias, caused by an inexperienced GPR operator meeting a tribal leadership wanting to believe their own folklore about unmarked graves and missing children. That the Kamloops leadership ultimately repudiated the finding of human remains showed goodwill. But goodwill or not, the original announcement unleashed a moral panic that will persist for years.