“Today marks the conclusion of our initial excavation,” words spoken on August 18 by Derek Nepinak, Chief of the remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve 440 km northwest of Winnipeg, Manitoba.
This suggests that further excavations looking for the remains of unnamed indigenous children no reserve members are frantically looking for will continue, at least if extravagant and wasteful public funding for such searches continues.
As of the end of September 2022, the federal government had allocated $90 million to aboriginal communities and organizations to help identify unmarked burials tied to former residential school sites where unspeakable horrors are said to have been meted out on their students.
The total amount of federal funds earmarked for research, commemoration, and field-investigation work is $320 million, so the Pine Cree Reserve still has a large cash reservoir to draw from.
The Pine Creek Indian Residential School, one of Canada’s longest-running boarding schools for treaty aboriginals (1890-1969), was operated by the Roman Catholic Church on behalf of the Government of Canada.
As with many of these schools, homesickness and an aversion to alien forms of discipline and regimentation led students to run away or engage in acts of arson. In 1928, a group of eight boys ran away from the school. Two years later, a boy was caught trying to set the school on fire.
Allegedly, “some of the living students have long spoken about the abuse there.” However, neither the nature of the abuse nor its perpetrators nor its victims have ever been identified except in the vaguest possible terms.
According to the Reserve’s July 18, 2023 “statement on excavation plan of unmarked burials at [the] former residential school site and Catholic Church”:
“Community members have been in planning since last fall to excavate the basement locations since the discovery [using ground penetrating radar] of 14 possible unmarked burials under the Church and 57 other suspected locations on the grounds around the church and old school site. We understand that over time burial sites may be lost to the natural elements but to bury remains under a building suggests a dark and sinister intent that cannot be unaddressed as we expose the truth of what happened in our homeland.”
The statement also revealed that the search was grounded in the 2021 alleged discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Indian Residential School in Kamloops, BC. Moreover, the Pine Creek copy-cat search included “reaching out to potential partners in exposing the truth, including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Archdiocese of the Catholic Church in Winnipeg, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, Brandon University, The federal Special Interlocutor’s Office for Missing Children and the International Commission on Missing Persons.”
To its credit, and unlike any other such search for the remains of students associated with the former boarding schools, the RCMP was called in last October to assist with the investigation.
Given all the accusations of school abuse, some passed down from generation to generation, band leaders, elders, knowledge keepers, and former boarding school students must have been devasted by the RCMP announcement on July 21 that:
“The investigation into possible criminality in relation to potential burials at Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Roman Catholic Church has moved into a new phase. After a year of interviewing community members, conducting surveys, and following up on leads, the RCMP has not uncovered evidence at this time related to criminal activity specific to the reflections detected at the site.”
“In consultation with the community and partners, a way forward has been found. A community-led forensic anthropological dig in the basement of the church is taking place. If anything is located that is possibly related to criminal activity, the RCMP has plans in place and investigators assigned to continue the investigation.”
And so the investigation continued to excavate, “the next step on a journey of trauma and healing,” likely exacerbated by the RCMP announcement, as members of the community were told at a research update on July 25, the day before the basement of the Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church that sits beside the former Pine Creek Residential School was dug up.
Nearly four weeks later, in an August 18 Facebook video, a despondent Chief Nepinak revealed the excavation’s results. Although “difficult truths” about “horrible things” at the school had been revealed by former students, presumably including the murder of indigenous children by clergy and staff, no evidence of human remains was found.
In retrospect, the only organization not contacted to help with the investigation was the most important one of all, namely the Government of Manitoba Vital Statistics Branch.
Why an allegedly sovereign “First Nation” hired a pricey ground penetrating radar (GPR) outfit with public monies to do a crude surface investigation before searching for the death records and death certificates of any alleged missing reserve children who had attended the local boarding school is troubling.
If truth-telling were really the goal of this investigation, community leaders and their consultants would have started by digging into the archives at little expense to determine the fate of the 21 “missing” children on the Pine Creek section of National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s Memorial Register, a list compiled “to forever remember and honour the children who never returned home from residential schools.”
Had it done so, it would have found that of these students, 15 have been found by an independent researcher, only one of whom was listed as having died at the Pine Creek Indian Residential School.
This finding goes to the heart of the uncertainty surrounding both the thousands of missing children listed on the Memorial Register and those claimed, as in the case of Pine Creek, to be buried in unmarked graves near the residential schools.
These very different issues have been deliberately or negligently conflated: the hundreds of alleged but unproven burial plots “discovered” in mainly named reserve cemeteries by the error-prone technique called GPR have found not a single missing Indian Residential School student.
On the other hand, of the 4,115 students listed in Memorial Register, nearly all have a name and date of death attached to them. Invariably, these former students are also referred to as “missing.” But they are not missing because they are known to be dead. Their cause of death, place of death, and place of burial is slowly being revealed by impartial researchers.
The sole purpose of this conflation is to imply that many or most named Memorial Register children are lying in the newly discovered GPR soil disturbances and thousands more that are still to be found.
As for Pine Creek, with no accountability required and $320 million of federal funds to draw on, Chief Nepinak was justified in opening the excavation of the church basement represents no conclusion for his reserve: “This does not mark the end of our truth-finding project.”
What now needs to be joyfully shouted from the rooftops are both the unique police investigation and the ground-breaking discovery of no human remains under the Pine Creek Catholic church, hopefully marking the beginning of a truth-finding effort rooted in Western science, objectivity, and critical thinking rather than fanciful indigenous horror stories.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba
