Part of the sensitivity around the issue is that it involves matters of faith, trust and betrayal that are bound up in the relationship between Indigenous…
There isn’t much evidence for the existence of Saint Anne, either, for that matter. She appears nowhere in the Bible, although down through the centuries she has come to be understood as the maternal grandmother of Jesus Christ. She does appear in the Qur’an, and although she first shows up in the apocryphal second-century Gospel of James, her life story is nearly indistinguishable from that of Hannah, the mother of the Hebrew prophet Samuel, from roughly 1,000 years before.
By July 26, it will be 14 months since a series of shocking and erroneous headlines about a “mass grave” discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to lower the flags on federal buildings throughout Canada. There were marches and statue-topplings, and quite a few similarly unconfirmed stories about other residential-school grave sites.
“We’re going to be getting together to really start mapping out what those next steps will be, but right now, this is too preliminary.”Article content Jules, one of Canada’s most prominent Indigenous leaders and currently the chief commissioner of the First Nations Tax Commission, stressed that only Chief Casimir can speak on behalf of the T’Kemlups people. But Jules confirmed that 14 major families within the community have made it known to the chief and council that an excavation, or exhumation, should begin as soon as possible.
I spoke with the report’s author and confirmed his background. He said he wants to remain anonymous because his company does work with First Nations and he doesn’t want to cause controversy. He only took an interest in the story about the discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops school because the labelling of the GPR anomalies as “probable” burials didn’t seem to add up.