Colonizer Questions
- DecolonizeMyself
- Jun 15
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 16
Residential School exhumed graves?

*WARNING: THIS POST HIGHLIGHTS THE RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL SYSTEM'S GENOCIDE*
National Indian Residential School Crisis Line (1-866-925-4419) exists to provide support for former Residential School students. The Crisis Line provides: Emotional and crisis referral services.
Hope For Wellness

Why create a blog post about this issue?
As a social media platform, I get asked a lot of questions about Indigenous everything. Sometimes there are racist comments, dm's, that I generally ignore for my own mental health and heart.
However, there is a question that pops up from time to time. Colonizer's always ask: "Where are the bodies?" or "How many graves have been exhumed with bodies?" I usually ignore these types of questions because you never know who is baiting or who is genuine.
I thought I would post some articles I've found along the way to help with the answer to this question.
For those who do not know what canadian residential schools are, here is a good place to start: https://nctr.ca/education/teaching-resources/residential-school-history/
Blog post cover image taken from article: Survivor of Canada residential school claims some children’s bodies were burnt there
Director of Indigenous support center says there was crematorium at Mohawk Institute Residential School
Seyit Aydogan | 02.07.2021 - Update : 02.07.2021
Naming the unknown: How First Nations are identifying the children buried in unmarked graves
By Krista Hessey Global News
Published October 22, 2022
Excerpt of article:
By now, most Canadians are aware of the flurry of searches underway. They might even know how ground-penetrating radar technology works, if vaguely. These investigations seek to confirm with science what survivors of these institutions have long known: children suffered unnecessary deaths at the hands of state and church-run schools that neglected, starved, and abused them.
Since 2021, more than 1,800 possible unmarked graves of children have been detected across the country. These findings have led to even more questions: Who were these children? Where did they come from? And what led to their deaths?
“Communities need to know where their children are. It’s a fundamental human right,” Nichols says.
With grave markers removed or lost over time, the anonymity of these deaths continues to haunt survivors and affect communities. Now more than ever, living descendants of students who died or went missing at residential schools are looking for answers about what happened to their loved ones. Finding those answers, though, is a daunting puzzle — one that scores of researchers across the country are trying to unravel.
Nine years before the world would be shocked by the discovery of 215 suspected unmarked graves at the former Kamloops residential school, Nichols and the Sioux Valley leadership were trying to figure out how to complete the fieldwork needed without political support or funding.
Gerald Bell, an elder and residential school survivor, has been involved with the project for several years. He can recall instances when he had to defend the investigation.
“Some of the attitudes we ran into were, ‘They’re dead. We don’t know who they are. Why are you so concerned? You know, it’s not your child. It’s not your relative,’ but it is,” he says. “All nations, we’re all related. So that’s a concept, I think, that the people outside the Native community don’t understand.”
Without the elders’ and survivors’ oral traditions, many of these graves would have remained unknown beneath the long grass. Nichols and Sioux Valley have now discovered 104 suspected unmarked graves on the Brandon school grounds. Eighty are contained within two forgotten school cemeteries and the rest are scattered east of where the main building once stood.
So far, Nichols has confirmed the names of 99 children who died while at the school — a product of slow, meticulous work and trial and error. As other First Nations embark on their own investigations, she hopes her experience can provide a sort of roadmap.
When she was starting out, she had thought that finding children’s names in the archives would be fairly straightforward. She figured there’d be attendance lists, cemetery maps, and death records.
“I think my expectations were a little naive,” Nichols admits today.
The United Church of Canada, which ran Brandon Residential School from 1925 to 1969, was supportive of Nichols’ research and gave her access to its archival holdings. But she quickly realized that many of the items she hoped to find did not exist — or, if they did, they were locked away in another collection elsewhere.
But there were clues within the dusty boxes and tattered books that are stacked to the ceiling of the church’s Winnipeg archives.
A letter to the Department of Indian Affairs would mention the unfortunate loss of a child in a farming accident. Operations reports would note the need for more beds for children that had contracted tuberculosis and pneumonia. Parents wrote letters to school officials complaining that their children were malnourished and severely beaten. The RCMP would report instances of runaways to the government.
These fragments of information paint a picture of what life was like for students, and why so many of them died or tried to flee.
The federal government, which funded and oversaw the residential school system, didn’t require the religious orders that ran the schools to report the deaths of children until the 1930s. Nichols compared those annual statistics to the church’s own records to put names to numbers.
But even then, there would be inconsistencies.
There were no universal recordkeeping standards in place for the residential school system, says Raymond Froger, the head archivist at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).
There’s no national, or even provincial, registry that contains the names of the 150,000 children that went through the system. It was up to individual principals to oversee that proper records were kept. Church authorities often lacked the resources to maintain consistent documentation, explains Frogner.
...Without cemetery maps, exhuming and testing remains for DNA is the only way to know exactly who is buried in each grave. If that’s the consensus communities come to, Nichols says, that’s what they’ll do.
Generations of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit have been living with unresolved questions. Finally, they are starting to get the answers they need to heal.
“It’s going to take a lot of people, many years of hard work,” says Nichols. “But we’re here to find all of the missing children.”

Special interlocutor releases final residential school graves report
Oct 29, 2024
The Special Interlocutor will identify needed measures and make recommendations for a new federal legal framework to ensure the respectful and culturally appropriate treatment of unmarked graves and burial sites of children at former Indian Residential Schools and associated institutions.
Final Report October 2024:
Solving a mystery from residential school
4 years ago
Duration 6:26
Mario Ballantyne records his efforts to find a boy from his community who went missing from residential school almost a century ago.
May 18, 2022
Saddle Lake Cree Nation
Alberta First Nation reveals findings of human remains near residential school
Jan. 2024:
Child’s remains found at site of former residential school northeast of Edmonton
By Jennifer Ivanov Global News
Posted January 24, 2024
Jan. 12, 2023
Lebret Residential School
Star Blanket Cree Nation
Child's remains discovered at site of former residential school
Jun 19, 2024
1st Cree child's body to be exhumed and returned to community after 2021 Quebec law
Law meant to help Indigenous families learn about children's deaths
Sep. 25, 2023
CBC The National
Revelations from an excavation near a former residential school
(The Pine Lake Cree Nation exhumed but found nothing. I thought it was also important to share)
USA
July 12, 2023
Indigenous Human Remains, Mostly Boarding School Children, Reported In 3 States This Week
Oct. 2023 T4
From The Conversation: We fact-checked residential school denialists and debunked their ‘mass grave hoax’ theory
Truth before reconciliation
Our research shows how detailed analysis can be an effective tool in confronting the growing threat of residential school denialism and other kinds of misinformation and disinformation, as called for recently by many Indigenous communities.
Instead of directing ridicule and outrage at denialists — which can give them a larger platform — what is needed is deep and reasoned analysis of their discourse to show why they are wrong or misleading.
This is the strategy of disempowering and discrediting residential school denialism advocated by former TRC Chair Murray Sinclair.
We hope others will join us in this type of research to help Canadians learn how to identify and confront residential school denialism and support meaningful reconciliation.
Our full findings can be read in our new report for the Centre for Human Rights Research at the University of Manitoba.
As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said in its final report, without truth there can be no genuine reconciliation.
Jun 2023
CBC: Residential school denialists tried to dig up suspected unmarked graves in Kamloops, B.C., report finds.
Denialism is the last step of genocide, says report from independent interlocutor
Residential school deniers tried to dig up suspected unmarked grave sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, not believing a May 2021 announcement from the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc that as many as 215 Indigenous children had been buried there, according to a new report.
"Denialists entered the site without permission. Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to 'see for themselves' if children are buried there," said a Friday report from Kimberly Murray, the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.
She did not say who the denialists were or when they came to the site.
But the unauthorized visits to the site are the work of a "core group" of Canadians who continue to deny, defend or minimize the physical, sexual, psychological and emotional abuse inflicted on Indigenous children in the Indian Residential School System "despite the indisputable evidence of survivors and their families," Murray said at a Friday news conference.
Other uninvited visitors, including denialists and some members of the media, were disrespectful of the site, breaching cultural protocols and taking videos and pictures of the burial area without permission, the report found.
In closing,
JUST ONE INDIGENOUS DEATH AT RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL IS TOO MANY. There are residential schools with grave sites. Schools should not have grave yards.
Denialists try to point to the causes being illness, accidents, etc as justification.
There is no justification. These children should have marked graves, should be known, and should have been given back to their families at time of death.
Denialists refuse to believe because they do not want to have to have empathy towards First Nations people. For them, it's easier to deal with their racism/hate for us then it is to have to deal with the compassion for us.