Unmarked graves stories in Canada lack hard evidence

After years of claims, Canadians are still left questioning whether remains will ever be found

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In May 2021, the Kamloops First Nation announced the discovery of 215 burial sites near a former residential school—a claim that sparked global headlines about “mass graves” and left Ottawa’s flag at half mast for five months.

We now know this was a mistake. A group of researchers, myself included, published Grave Error, laying out the reasons for skepticism. The ground-penetrating radar (GPR) results had almost certainly been misread, confusing thousands of feet of buried weeping tile in the orchard with human burials.

Our book can’t claim all the credit, but it probably helped shift public opinion. A clear majority of Canadians now say they want to see actual evidence, exhumed human remains, before accepting further claims of unmarked graves.

But despite Kamloops collapsing under scrutiny, the beat goes on. In August 2025, three new stories appeared about more supposed discoveries.

The Penelakut Tribe on Vancouver Island made headlines with a claim of graves on the grounds of the former Kuper Island residential school. The reporting was so vague it was impossible to know how many graves they thought they’d found. What was clear is that ground-penetrating radar was being used on known cemeteries. If you go looking in a graveyard, it should not surprise you to find graves.

Not to be outdone, the Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast announced the discovery of 41 additional unmarked graves near the former St. Augustine’s residential school. They had already claimed 40 in 2023, bringing the total to 81. The B.C. Legislature dutifully lowered its flag yet again.

Both B.C. stories shared the same shortcomings. No digging, no human remains, no public release of the actual survey data. Just announcements. Officials said they had uncovered archival material but provided no names, no documents and no proof of deaths or burials.

Meanwhile, in the Northwest Territories, the Dene at Fort Resolution tried a different approach. An Indian Residential School (IRS) had operated there from 1910, but decades earlier the Oblates had run a boarding school on Mission Island a couple of miles away. Unlike a federally funded IRS, it took in Indigenous, Métis and White children drawn north by the fur trade.

The Dene used GPR around Fort Resolution and came up empty. They then brought in cadaver dogs on Mission Island and claimed to have found the graves of five children and two adults. The word “excavation” appeared in news reports, but no one clarified whether that meant probing the surface or actually exhuming remains. And, as in B.C., no scientific or archival evidence was shared publicly.

Even if burials were located on Mission Island, what’s the connection to the residential school? People of all backgrounds lived there for half a century before the IRS opened in Fort Resolution. Deaths and burials were inevitable.

But would missionaries really cart bodies back to an island cemetery once a school existed in town? That strains belief.

It helps no one for First Nations to keep promoting claims with little evidence and for much of the media to repeat them without scrutiny. The result is predictable: more victimhood narratives on one side, more public doubt on the other. If Ottawa cut off funding for these repeated searches, the claims would quickly dry up. And we’d all be better off.

Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.