Enough is Enough: #ReleaseTheBeaulieuReport!

On May 21-24, 2021, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu, a professor at the University of the Fraser Valley, was contracted to do a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the apple orchard next to the the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS). This survey resulted in what we will now refer to as “The Beaulieu Report”. Although, the Kamloops band announced “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children” on the basis of the findings of The Beaulieu Report, it has not been released to the public (despite Rosanne Casimir stating that the report would be “shared“/ “released“, and this promise being reneged upon). This means that the methodology of The Beaulieu Report cannot be scrutinized by independent experts.

In spite of the press release declaring that “the remains of 215 children” were found in clandestine burials, the RCMP has not investigated the KIRS site. This is because, on June 3, 2021, Murray Sinclair, at the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, accused the RCMP of “intimidating” Dr. Beaulieu, and argued that they should not be “pursuing those who are revealing information”. He recommended to Beaulieu that she retain legal counsel to prevent her from being “mistreated” by the RCMP. This led the RCMP to stand back and “await further instruction” from the Kamloops band (click here for a transcript of Sinclair’s statement).

The Beaulieu Report cannot be considered a “private” document because it was paid for by the Canadian government. This was revealed on June 18, 2021 by Ms. Melanie Kwong (Director General, Major Events, Commemorations and Capital Experience, Department of Canadian Heritage) when she made a presentation to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. In this presentation she stated that the Kamloops band had “received a $40,000 grant” that involved “the use of ground-penetrating radar technology” that “contributed to the identification of human remains” (see page 2 of the Standing Committe’s Report).

The $40,000 grant for The Beaulieu Report is filed under Number 1333883.

According to the journalist Lisa Cordasco, Dr. Beaulieu asserted that “she offered her services [to the Kamloops band] last year [in 2020], after speaking with a colleague from the Indigenous studies department at Simon Fraser University” when she “learned that a juvenile tooth was excavated at the site in the late 1990s, early 2000s, during an archaeological survey by Simon Fraser University”.

A month and a half after the Kamloops band’s Press Release, on July 15, 2021, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu gave a presentation where she stated that there were “200 targets of interest” and that there was an “east-west configuration of the subsurface anomalies in the orchard”. In this presentation, therefore, Beaulieu revised the “remains of 215 children” claim of the Kamloops band to “200 targets of interest”.

The change in the number from “215” to “200” occurred because Dr. Beaulieu was informed after she did her survey that “archaeological impact assessments” had been done in the area that 15 “anomalies” had been found. This meant that there were “200 targets of interest” that remained, as 15 could not be clandestine burials. Such a conclusion begs the question as to why the other “200 targets of interest” are not due to similar disturbances as those that resulted in the 15 “anomalies” being detected from “archaeological impact assessments”.

Dr. Beaulieu also stated that another indication that the 200 anomalies were graves was that “there was an east-west configuration of the subsurface anomalies in the orchard that support typical Christian burial traditions”. This was in spite of the fact that this was not a cemetery, but an old apple orchard, and so any human burials would have been clandestine. Is it being suggested that those in a hurry to bury children illicitly would have been concerned about the “east-west configuration” of their secret digging?

Dr. Beaulieu did not seem to be aware that the “east-west configuration” identified also was the configuration of the “East Sewage Disposal Bed”, where trenches were dug in 1925-1926. These excavations have been throughly documented by “Kam Res” on the website “Graves in the Apple Orchard“.

Many other excavations have occurred in the apple orchard with an “east-west configuration” (the yellow boxes in the highlighted circles are where the “anomalies” were found).

On July 27, 2021, Hugo Cardoso, the Chair of the Simon Fraser University archaeology department, told Nina Green the following:

The report was also thoroughly reviewed by a designated review team of five archaeologists very experienced in GPR, and all agreed that it was methodologically sound.

In this email, Dr. Cardoso also said that the tooth referred to by Beaulieu “has subsequently been identified as not human” and that his department had “no information” on the “reported rib bone” that was “found by a community member”. At this point in time, no one has been able to state where the rib bone is, and how it was determined to be human.

On July 28, 2021, George Nicholas, a Simon Fraser University archaeologist who has done extensive work with the Kamloops band, told Nina Green that he could not respond to her inquiries about The Beaulieu Report because he had been “strongly advised by the TteS legal team not to respond to any queries from the public regarding the search for unmarked graves in Kamloops”.

It was these same “experts” reviewing The Beaulieu Report, however, that did not point out to Beaulieu the multiple excavations that had taken place on the site. Perhaps, however, they did identify the 15 of the “anomalies” that were in areas that had been previously excavated by the Simon Fraser University archaeology department shown below. This would explain why Dr. Beaulieu had to admit this in her July 15, 2021 presentation and state that there were now only “200 targets of interest”.

We have now waited three years for the Kamloops band to take responsibility for the false claim that they made on May 27, 2021. The Beaulieu Report, therefore, needs to be released to the Canadian public. The Canadian government paid $40,000 for it, and so releasing the report is necessary to ensure transparency and accountability. Simon Fraser University – a publicly funded entity – also has a close relationship to the Kamloops band, and so its objectivity is questionable. Finally, the false claim of the Kamloops band about “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children” has resulted in accusations that there is evidence that “genocide” has been perpetrated against indigenous people. This continues to cause a great deal of hostility towards non-indigenous people and even resulted in arson attacks against a number of churches. The release of The Beaulieu Report is the first step in attempting to get to the truth of the matter, which we are told is necessary for reconciliation.