White nationalists march at T’Kemlups First Nation with signs reading “Got Bones?” September 27, 2026 (photo courtesy of Global News)
Kamloops is once again proving to be the place where Canada confronts its dark side.
Five years ago, it was where the bones of unidentified children prompted a search that forced a reckoning with the legacy of residential schools. This week, it is where Canadians saw the far right on the march in our own country.
The chilling scenes of men in paramilitary formation, hiding their faces as they intimidate marginalized communities into silence - these scenes have now come to our own country. Like many far right political statements, this one was designed to attract attention using offensive views - a signal that breaks through to mainsteam audiences so they can recruit new members.
Why would Kamloops be the site where the far right seeks to advertize itself? Because many Canadians in the mainstream remain deeply ambivalent about the truth.
For those not following the search for missing children in Kamloops closely, a recap of the facts as we know them so far.
Bones and teeth from the corpses of unidentified children discovered on the grounds of the former residential school prompted the community to survey the grounds with ground-penetrating radar. The radar detected some 200 rectangles of disturbed earth in neat rows, similar to graves.
The community had mourned many children who disappeared while attending that school over the century of its existence, and in May 2021 Chief Roseanne Casimir announced the community’s conclusion that these disturbances represented their final resting place. She did not use the term “mass grave” but when a New York Times reporter did the term it lit a fuse on the fuel of a highly polarized media environment.
The announcement had an electric impact on non-Indigenous Canadians. Six years earlier the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had demonstrated conclusively that residential schools were designed to harm Indigenous communities on a scale that fit the international legal definition of genocide. But it was only in 2021 that the message finally registered with a majority of non-Indigenous Canadians, in the image of a large number of children’s graves suggested by the findings.
But the announcement also unleashed a flood of hate speech aimed at the community. I spoke on a panel with Chief Casimir in 2023, and heard her own testimony about the flood of hatred that announcement unleashed.
Unsurprisingly, the community stopped communicating with the outside world about the process they are following to identify who is buried where. But the void of information has created a online furore by Canadians – many of whom do not accept that the community has the right to conduct the search by its own standards and on its own timeline.
Our project has now been involved to the search efforts at three different residential schools, and the knowledge we’ve gained helped provide important perspective. First, while almost no non-Indigenous school in Canada has graves associated with them, virtually every Indian residential school did. Even the thousands of deaths that were documented at residential schools exceeded deaths at non-Indigenous schools by a factor of twenty, to take one investigation conducted in the most lethal period of residential school history in the first decade of the 20th century. And don’t forget, First Nations people all across the country remember family members that died or disappeared - they just don’t know where they are buried.
All this adds up to a high likelihood that the soil disturbances discovered at Kamloops do contain human remains.
Second, the process of conducting a search for human remains is extraordinarily complex at both technical and ethical levels. Why, how, when and where you search, who decides and who gets informed, what happens to any remains that are uncovered - these are issues that would take your average government or court years to work out. When the decision is being taken by a small First Nations band experiencing trauma, it would be reasonable to double that time.
Third, if there are human remains the people with the greatest stake in knowing are the likely relatives. The primary consideration for them is likely to be to honour the dignity of the dead. Normally, it would be weird for any outsiders to insist that they have a greater right to know than the relatives do, and to insist on the form of proof they will accept. When those outsiders come from the same community that may bear responsibility for the deaths it’s not weird, it’s perverse.
Those non-Indigenous Canadians who insist on proof reveal that they are more focussed on their own emotions than on the truth. Seeking to determine who much guilt one should feel, or not feel, is an exercise in narcissism. It’s fundamentally not the responsibility of communities affected by harm to attend to the feelings of those that caused the harm.
In spite of all these consideration, the call has grown among non-Indigenous Canadians that the grounds around the former school be dug up. The country should be focussed on the greater truth - the truth that our country created institutions in which tens of thousands of children were harmed, generation after generation, and in which thousands died. But instead has used an obsession with a smaller truth to avoid doing so.
Canada is paying the price for having glossed over the Truth component of our Truth and Reconciliation process. Unlike similar exercises in the many other countries that have turned to confront human rights abuses in their path, ours did not include accountability for those that committed the abuses. The commission that the Harper government was forced to launch had a mandate to conduct research into the truth, but no mechanisms to force the churches and governments officials who ran these schools to confront the findings that emerged.
As a result, the flood of evidence that residential school system caused intentional harm to children, their communities and their nations has registered with too few non-Indigenous Canadians. Truths this painful are easier to avoid than to confront, because they demonstrate a gap between our ideals and our behaviour.
When the gap between ideals and behaviour persists, it creates fertile ground for extremists who reject those ideals altogether. The opportunity to gain audiences by defying the ideals because irresistable. Extremists espouse the opposite of what our society stands for, and it resonates because it seems authentic to endorse evil when those endorsing good avoid accounability.
That’s why the Second Suns marched on Kamloops. And it’s why those of us who care about democracy must embrace the truths, no matter how painful they are.
Ben Rowswell
