In recent years, much ink has been splashed on newsprint regarding graves of students at government or church operated off-reservation Indian schools. Not infrequently, things that happened at other schools were attributed to Carlisle Indian School without evidence to back up the claims. Some of the most egregious claims were made about schools operated by the Roman Catholic Church in Canada.
The discovery of a child’s tooth and a juvenile rib bone by a tourist and stories of elders and knowledge keepers about dead students being buried at night in the orchard of Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia led to conclusions that missing children were buried in mass graves on the site. Ground-penetrating radar was brought in to determine if the orchard was indeed a mass burial site. The study indicated that 215 possible graves were located under the ground but excavations would be needed to determine if human remains were present or not. Technicians operating the equipment indicated that tree roots, metal objects, and stones could also be detected.
Dr. Sarah Beaulieu, a modern conflict anthropologist who teaches at University of the Fraser Valley, who performed the search, revised the initial estimate of probable grave sites downward to 200 after considering previous excavation work done in the area that may have affected the results.
This discovery led to Pope Francis issuing a formal apology for the Catholic Church’s role in operating the government Indian schools and reporting by all the major media in the United States in Canada. It also led to the burning of at least 85 historic Catholic churches and the appropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars by the Canadian Federal government.
7.9 million was spent to excavate the site. It has now been reported that the excavation found no mass grave site or any human remains.
Tags: archaeology, catholic, church, faith, travel
Tom Benjey's Weblog 
May 17, 2024 at 8:13 pm |
Along the same vein as when they take home remains from a school only to find out after dna testing that it wasn’t even their relative, then what? And I’m not making light of any legitimate suffering that we know did go on.
May 18, 2024 at 10:33 am |
My guess is that the graves at Carlisle were marked correctly when the students died but were mixed up when they were relocated in the 1920s. Government workers doing the reinterment did a sloppy job. The only way to clean up this mess is to test the DNA on all the remaining remains. However, some tribes oppose this. Not all the graves were for students. A few were for soldiers and one was the child of the Oneida bandmaster.
May 18, 2024 at 1:30 pm |
Hi Tom, yes, Dennison Wheelock and his wife lost a child there.