The Decibel - The search for graves at Tk’emlups, five years on

Episode Date: May 27, 2026

Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation near Kamloops, B.C. was the site of a national reckoning over the legacy of residential schools. On May 27, 2021, the First Nation announced it had discovered 215 probable unmarked graves on the ground of a former residential school, using ground-penetrating radar technology. The number was later revised to around 200 probable graves.  Since that revelation, leaders of the First Nation have been reluctant to provide more information and have not yet conducted an archeological dig of the former residential school grounds.  Five years on and with few concrete answers, a loud contingent of skeptics and denialists have grown.  Globe reporters Willow Fiddler and Patrick White join The Decibel to report on what they have learned since, the impact of the initial announcement, the complexities of working on a site like this, and what is planned for the investigation going forward. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I want to bring you back to a moment of reckoning in Canada. On May 27, 2021, the chief of Tukamlup's to Sequhum Nation announced that the remains of 215 former residential school students have been found on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian residential school in British Columbia. The discovery was made with the use of ground-penetrating radar technology. This restarted a national conversation about the atrocities of the country's residential school system. More than 3,500 children died in the system, according to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation. The story out of Campbell-Oops garnered international media attention. And in Canada, flags were flown at half-mast for five months.

Imprompted memorials in public spaces with kids' shoes were built across the country, representing the children who died in the residential school system. And a national day for truth and reconciliation was established. But five years on, no answers have been unearthed from the site. And that has led to some skepticism and doubt about these suspected graves. Globe reporters Willow Fiddler and Patrick White have been looking into what's been going on over the past five years. Today, they'll talk about the impact of the initial announcement,

the complexities of working on a site like this, and what is planned for the investigation going forward. I'm Cheryl Sutherland, and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Willow, Patrick, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thanks for having us. Thanks. So I started off in the intro with a bit of a reminder of what happened five years ago. And I want to ask you both.

I'll start with Patrick. Can you help us understand why did this moment have such an impact on Canada? I think it was really a press release that came out on May 27, 2021, that said very definitively that children's remains, 215 sets of children's remains, had been found on the grounds of the former Camelope's Indian residential school. The press release went on to say that the remains belong to children as young as three years old. They said they were all former students.

They said they were undocumented deaths. So there was no documentation in anything the TRC, the Truth and Reconciliation had done, or any other groups had done to figure out who was in the ground. ground there. There wasn't a lot of opportunity to ask questions about that original release. So I think the international media immediately jumped on this press release because that is a shocking thing. No one can deny that. And that story went around the world. Some international outlets mainly called these mass graves, which was quickly reined in. That was not true.

So I think there was this idea that Canada was quickly lumped in with other nations that had found mass graves of people who had been disappeared. And it just became a bit of an international sensation. Yeah. And I mean, I remember bringing myself back five years as well, that, you know, this, this moment was kind of a symbol of the atrocities of the residential school system in Canada. And I guess, Willow, what would you say? Like, why do you think this moment had such an impact here in Canada?

Well, I mean, we've known for some time that there's children buried on these school grounds across the country. But to hear something that definitive is shocking for everybody. I think like everyone else in this country and across the world, around the world, I was shocked. I recall at the time that the news broke sitting with my father who was a residential school survivor. And he never really talked much about his experience going to residential school. But one of the things that really struck me was one of our conversations that he was recalling the time when he was sent to residential school and how it was such a big decision for his parents who, really wanted to buy into the idea that, you know, residential schools were for educating. They were for, you know, expanding children's worldview, I guess.

And then I just recall my father sitting there saying very quietly that if his dad had known what was going to happen at these residential schools, he would have never sent his kids there. And that really struck me because I think the news, of the 215 really impacted survivors in particular, even though we've known kind of all along and survivors have known, you know, through stories, first-hand experience, that deaths occurred at residential schools

and that there are these burial grounds there. It was just very a somber moment. And to kind of hear that regret, yeah, really struck me hard. So if I understand, when the announcement happened, the probable burials that were found with ground penetrating radar, it's kind of like it's everything that you knew from all along, but now it looked like there was something in the ground. Yeah, it would have validated for a lot of survivors, their experiences and, you know, the abuses and everything they endured. many of them have siblings that never made it home. So for survivors, this also would have been very retramatizing moment for them, which then is further compounded traumatizing for them to have the response of the skeptics and the denialists.

But I think for the most part, it was very validating because we have heard, you know, we do know the stories, we do know the numbers. And the numbers recorded by the TRC are likely a huge under estimate of the actual numbers, which I doubt we will ever really truly know that. And when you speak of the numbers, you're talking about that more than 3,500 children died in the system. That's according to the National Center of Truth and Reconciliation. Right. Yeah. So, Patrick, as you mentioned, there was a lot of interest from the international media. And I can imagine that this was a big deal for the community.

It was probably like very overwhelming. And Willow, can you give us a sense of what this community is like and what it was like for them to have all this media attention descend upon them? Yeah. Well, I spent some time with Gary Gottfordsen, who is a survivor of the school, a knowledge keeper. And he described it to me as hell, like the 24 hours following the announcement. and press release, it's a community. The nation's beautiful, of course, very culturally proud.

A lot of people working to reclaim the language, for example. They've got very strong ties to the land and the language. And you see that around the community from the school grounds to where they have the powwow arbor, which is a beautiful space where the nation and people gather for ceremonies and powwows and other. events. But even going kind of across the road, you go, and it's also very, a lot of economic development happening there. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had their own Starbucks, which was nice. I think that was the first, first nation I've been to that had its own Starbucks. And, you know, in the parking lot, there's signs that are designated specifically for elders

parking. So, you know, it's a very respectful community. and very culturally proud. So Patrick, when did the questions start to emerge? Yeah, so in the days and weeks after, there arose a lot of questions around precisely what they had found. There was a press conference about seven weeks after the original announcement where the archaeologist on this file, Cerebolio, did present some of her findings,

but it was very brief. There wasn't an opportunity for many questions. Again, that was a press conference where she said she was going to pull back on the original declaration that they'd found remains and say they'd found probable burials. And I think from that day on, we see a community that really decides to stop responding to queries from the media. I know I personally sent somewhere in excess of 10 media requests into Kamloops. none were ever responded to.

I know many other reporters have had the same experience. I think there was just a decision within the community that we are going to keep the lid on the information coming out of the community. I don't have insights on that decision making within Tocumloops. I can only speculate that there was a decision to simply stop speaking with the media in such a prominent way and do this investigation on their own terms, on their own timeline. I want to talk a little bit about the technology that was used in this discovery, which was this ground penetrating radar. Can you just explain how ground penetrating radar works? Yeah, with ground penetrating radar, it's a funny looking machine that is used on these sites.

It almost looks like a lawnmower. It's got, in most cases, it's got four wheels and is pushed over a site of expected anomalies back and forth. over the ground. It's much like normal radar. It beams waves down through the ground. And when those waves hit certain anomalies that are of certain size or density, those waves bounce back to the machine. The machine reads them and it shows up as kind of like, there are a few different ways that it seems to read, come back on these machines, but it almost looks to my complete layman's eyes like a weather map or something. And so it's able to read the density of, you know, of certain subterranean objects compared to the general soil around it.

So if there's a tree stump or a rock or something or in some of these cases of suspected graves, it's going to create a certain reflection. I've talked to scientists in this field before we ran this story and actually since some have called into me. it's really hard to specify what you're finding below the surface. And I think a lot of people in this field looked at the findings that were, they declared in the original press release and had some real skepticism around that, because they know having used this technology a lot, but you really can't be that definitive about what this machine is reading back to you.

Has ground penetrating radar been used in other similar cases? Like to find graves? Yeah, it's used very commonly in unmarked graves cases. We found another case in Tulsa when there was the, they've done a lot of work around the Tulsa massacre that happened there. They have in that investigation in Tulsa found a number of graves, but there's one particular location where they used ground-preditating radar determined there were very probably graves below the ground.

When they went to dig, they found artifacts and trinkets and things, but no ground. graves there. So it's hit or miss. So you talked a bit about how the archaeologist here, Sarah Bolle, came out about seven weeks later and clarified what exactly she had found. So she revised the language to probable burials and that there were likely closer to 200 of them as opposed to 215. So how was this change of information received by the public? Like I'm just wondering, Is this where we start seeing skepticism? Yeah, I would say so. I think it was a major course correction,

even though it was a change in just a few words. It was a major correction in the information we had. And I think some of us failed to pick up on it. And I take some responsibility to that I didn't notice how great of a course correction that actually was. I don't think everyone picked up on it when the main archaeologist on this case came out and offered that correction, because we continue to see after that a lot of stories all over this country and all over the

world referring to these as remains. And people involved in the case referring to these remains as well. So in the early days, was there any plan to investigate the site further? Like were there plans to excavate the site? Yeah, in the days after we heard a lot of people in Ticumelps were talking about excavation. there was a meeting, there was a committee formed of the 13 founding families into Cumloups. And we heard through a CBC interview that they had decided that excavation was something that they preferred in this case. And that was getting to kind of late 2021 into 2022.

Then things kind of quiet down for a long time for years about that activity, about that word. So that becomes really hard to report out that story because you just have kind of a wall of silence on the receiving end. And that leads to a lot of speculation out there. As reporters, we can't really speculate. We have to go on the information we have in front of us. So it was very frustrating from me in this craft of reporting to not be able to get any answers at all. I did request as many accounting reports as I could. So Tocomloops, when this first took place, the federal government put up a fund that First Nations across the country.

And there were dozens and dozens that wanted to conduct their own searches, but it cost a lot of money. So they wanted some assistance from the federal government, which was initially saying it was fully willing to assist with that. To Cumbloops put in an application. and so I requested all those applications from all the First Nations under Freedom Information, as well as any accounting that Tocumlopes had to do for how they spent the money or how they reallocated the money. Most of that information came back redacted, so we don't really know to this day how a lot of the money it was spent. But what I did see there was that the proportionate, posed a lot of activities. Excavation was one of them, but there was also money for field work

and many other activities. How much money was given to this investigation from the federal government? So as far as I could see, the original request from To Come Loops was on July 5th, 2021, and it was about $9.5 million over two years, I believe. And the work plan had a whole bunch of activities related. There were forensic archaeologists, mapping technicians, knowledge keepers, microfreece scanners, they wanted security guards. That 9.5 million, I think there's been a lot of attention paid to how this money was spent. I think there's a contingent out there that believes that this money was for excavation and excavation only, and because excavation has not been done, that this money was somehow misappropriated. What I find from Lillian,

looking at the freedom of information documents is that this money was for a wide range of activities. Excavation was one of them that they mentioned in there. But the documents say in the correspondence with the federal government shows that they could reallocate that. So the money could be for excavation, but didn't necessarily have to be for excavation. If they felt that they wanted to put the entire sum into some other activity like DNA sampling, which they have proposed, then they were free to do so.

Willow, can you speak to the complexity of excavating a site like this? Yeah, and I think this is part of the process where it's important to point out that this has to be a first nations-led process for Kamloops, for all other nations that are doing these ground searches. And the reason for that is because there are going to be specific cultural protocols that these nations have to follow for excavating and for burials. And that's going to be different for nations and even for different families from the same nation. Some people will say, you know, we don't want to excavate. That's going to disrupt this child's spirit.

It's best to just leave it be. And some families and nations will be the opposite where they do want to excavate and where they do feel that they need to bury their ancestors and have ceremony for them back home or wherever they're from. And I just want to point out, I feel like Canada's really far behind in this respect. The States has the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, which basically says institutions that get federal money have to work with these nations to

repatriate. And I did a story a few years ago on this, a Sissotan-Wapiton tribe in South Dakota, repatriated two of their ancestors from the Carlisle Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania, where they were buried on an army base. So the army has this repatriation program, and they work with the tribes and the nations and the families to ensure that all of these cultural protocols and ceremonies are being followed, and they make space for that to happen. It's quite incredible, actually, because they want to, everybody wants to just honor and respect, respect the process. and respect the ancestors, the children, and the families.

And so, you know, I really feel Canada could, like, follow suit and take some notes from that. And just really driving home that we have to work with First Nations to make it happen and be respectful of their ways of doing so. We'll be right back. I want to talk about how the perception of this story has changed. How do people in Canada view what happened into come loops? Like, what do we know about that? Are there other numbers?

Yeah, Anger's Reid did a poll last summer, at least the results came out last summer, that showed that 63% of Canadians were not willing to accept the original claims of To Come Loops about there being remains until there's an excavation done. So what we're seeing is that questions that were coming out early in the weeks and months have really grown to become kind of a majority position across the country. Yeah, so it's a very significant number, 63%. I was a little surprised to see that. That it's, that is that high. That just shows that there's, I think, a growing kind of exhaustion with not getting answers with the story, which really, I think, reflects what a lot of reporters who've covered the story at all kind of feel that we really would like to be offering some new information. And the opportunity is just not going to be there.

There's only one thing that can provide that. and that is a forensic archaeological dig of that site. And that simply has not been done yet. And as we talked about, that it's easier than done, right? There's a lot of complexities involved in that dig. So we're talking about skepticism, but there's also outright denialism.

Can you talk about what we're talking about here? Yeah, I mean, I know there's a lot of people who don't agree with me saying this, but I do think on the skepticism end, there's a wide array of opinions. I think there's a real spectrum. There are people who simply want answers. But among that 63%, there are those who are skeptical of the findings, and there are those who take to social media and say, you know, every hoax matters.

They've called this the greatest hoax in Canadian history. There's another hashtag I've seen, dig up or shut up. This is where skepticism bleeds into blatant racism. And I think one of the conclusions that people on the far extreme of this reach and want to perpetuate is that because we don't have any bodies into cumloops means that there's a huge logical leap here that the residential experience was benign, benevolent, and everything we've heard from the TRC, everything we've heard from Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologizing for residential schools. that's all wrong. And, you know, the skepticism, I hope that leaves space for truth and accurate and information, whereas, you know, the denialism, I don't think, you know, that's a closed door and that's nothing's getting in or out of that. Yeah. Maybe that's a little naive and hopeful, but. No, I think that's a good way to put it. I think a skeptic is somebody who's open to new information

and changing their opinion based on the best information that's out there. I think that's what reporters are. I think to the more extreme end, like you say, it's a closed door. I think whatever information comes out of Tocumloops, if to come loops were to find remains there during an archaeological dig, I think people on that end are not going to believe it, and they're going to kind of move the goalposts to accord with their worldview. I'm curious to know about what's been going on in the community.

And Willa, you actually went there last summer. What did you find out? Not a lot. Unfortunately, when I got this assignment last year, I mean, it was, I knew right away that I had to be on the ground for this story. This isn't something that, you know, you can do phone interviews and whatnot. It was really important that I have a presence there. At the end of the day, I did not get the. on the record interview that I was hoping for, but it gave me, you know, it gave me a better

understanding of maybe why this media blackout was happening, the reluctance to speak with media. Right, because not just you, they weren't speaking with, it was media in general, right? In general. Like Patrick mentioned, you know, emails, I've sent out, you know, a dozen or so emails to them requesting an interview and to talk. I didn't get a response until I actually went there in person, which I'm not, you know, really, I'm not saying reporters go and do that. You're going to take your chance with that. I did get to speak to some of the community members, which was great, you know, very gracious.

Yeah, it's been difficult for them, you know, and maybe that's part of the piece that we haven't really seen yet either, is what is it like for the members of that nation? I can't imagine having to go through five years of fielding media and denialists and all while trying to come to terms themselves with what's happening with this investigation, they kind of found out with everyone else when this happened. And they've had to reconcile, you know, that for themselves.

And also just the whole process. I mean, now they're talking about, you know, they're doing the DNA testing, how to protect that. And, you know, you've got community members who are ready to do that work and are, you know, lining up to get tested and whatnot. So there is a sense of wanting answers as well from the nation. So you mentioned DNA testing, Willow. What are they planning with that?

Can you explain, Patrick? Yeah, they had mentioned the DNA testing in previous years, but we'd never really gotten any more answers on it. Last year we came across an online seminar that some members of Ticumloops had been involved with. It was hosted by an organization called the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools, Missing Children and Unmarked Burials. Jeanette Jules and Thomas James, two people working on the Ticumlips investigation, were part of this seminar. And it gave a bit more detail on what they mean by that DNA testing. they want to test and extract DNA from living members of Tocumloops and other communities that send children to this residential school so that if they turn up any remains on that site, they can compare the living DNA with the DNA of those remains and try to make familial matches. So they can determine who exactly they turn up when and when and if those remains come up.

And this online seminar actually pointed a whole plan that they do have in place for the next couple of years. The DNA testing is a big part of that. They have to get a number of consents, legal consents in place, both for individuals to provide that DNA and for communities to sign on, to allow members to provide that DNA. They have to figure out where to store that information once they do get it. They don't want it in a cloud server on some mysterious data center or somewhere. They want to own that information and preferably have it into cum loops. There's, I think they said something like 100 terabytes of information that they want owned on servers controlled by the community. And they did talk about excavation as well.

I was going to say, if they're talking about DNA, then they must be talking about excavation as well. Tell me about that. There wasn't a lot of other detail in this seminar about that excavation, but it did say that if they can get consent from all the communities that send children here, as well as to come loops, there is a plan in place to do it by the end of 2026 or 2027. There seems to be attention at the core of the story that none of the leadership will speak to us. How do we square this discomfort between our processes as journalists and how the leaders of the

community have decided to go forward? Patrick, I'll start with you. Yeah, I think we're in this really uncomfortable space here where there's more questions than answers. We have information that there's a forensic dig being planned for the site. We don't know precisely when it'll happen. We don't know how it will happen. This is a community that's really taken control of this process

and is deciding that they are going to prioritize their community and providing information to their community over the national and international media. And that's their prerogative. After so long of working on this story, I have to just tell myself that we have to be comfortable in this space, this ambiguous space, we just won't know for a while. And jumping to conclusions on either side of this issue is really not helpful for somebody in my space, which is a reporter. It's not a columnist. So I'm just going to have to stay in this space, this uncomfortable space. Well, well, we're still.

the truth era of truth and reconciliation. And like Patrick said, that's going to be uncomfortable for a lot of people. And as journalists, yeah, we have deadlines, you know, we have a news cycle. And that's something that media is going to have to, you know, reconcile for themselves, that, you know, at times we do have to step back and recognize that First Nations have that right and that oftentimes they're accountable, you know, and responsible to their community first, not the general public. And, you know, that's not going to sit well with a lot of people and, you know, frustrates journalists. But that's something that we all, I think, collectively have to understand and work with. What happens to the community if they do this excavation and they don't find anything or if they do?

Like, what do we know about how the community is kind of preparing for either possibility? I get the sense from talking to people there that there is a great belief about what lies beneath that ground. And that's why some of these claims about hoax and lie are so hurtful to people in that community. They know the stories. The ground penetrating radar just seems to solidify some of those stories. And there is a belief about children being in that ground. Many people don't want it to be true. Of course, who would want that to be true once there is a dig?

So I don't know that there is a lot of preparation yet for either eventuality, but I think either way it's going to be pretty difficult. Yeah, there's no easy ending here for anybody, especially the community, the nation. It just reminded me of 2022, I think it was, when the indigenous delegation of survivors went to the Vatican to meet with the Pope, which prompted his apology later that summer. And one of my questions to one of the elders and survivors there

was kind of like, well, what's next? And, you know, she very quickly and gently said, well, we have to bring our children home. Like that's, there's no doubt or question that there's children that need to be brought home. That never returned home. And how that's going to play out and how that's going to impact the nations and the families involved is not going to be easy. I mean, we're, you know, it's still a very much long process. And we just have to be prepared to deal with it with as much great.

and kindness and respect as we can. Willow, Patrick, thank you so much. Thanks. Thank you. That was Willow Fiddler and Patrick White, reporters for the globe. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland. This episode was mixed by Ali Graham.

Our producers are Madeline White, Rachel Levy McLaughlin and Mahal Stein. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.