Nina Green’s email to Senators, MPs, MLAs and Journalists

From: Nina Green

Subject: Parliament has to put the RCMP back on the job at Kamloops

Date: November 26, 2023 at 3:09:44 PM PST

Through Murray Sinclair’s intervention via a Parliamentary Committee, the Kamloops Band has been allowed to investigate its own false statements

The media release on 27 May 2021 which stated that ‘the remains of 215 children’ had been found using ground penetrating radar (GPR) at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School shocked the world.

It is well established that GPR cannot locate human remains. It can only locate soil disturbances beneath the ground.  Excavation must take place before it can be determined what those soil disturbances are.

On 27 May 2021, the Kamloops Band was well aware that no excavation had taken place, and that a media release stating that human remains had been found would mislead the world.  It was thus incumbent on the Kamloops Band to call in the BC Coroner and the Kamloops RCMP (which has a detachment on the Kamloops Reserve only a few yards from the former residential school) to do an immediate preliminary excavation to determine the nature of the soil disturbances. 

Unfortunately, that did not happen.

According to Chief Rosanne Casimir, the Kamloops Band did meet with an RCMP officer from the detachment on the Reserve prior to 28 May 2021.  It seems the officer visited the site where the GPR work had been done, and must have observed that no excavation had taken place and that no human remains had actually been found, a fact that would have been immediately obvious to anyone visiting the site.

The RCMP opened a file and questioned Dr Sarah Beaulieu, who had done the GPR work but whose identity, for no legitimate reason, was being kept secret from the public.  However the investigation was short-lived.

Early on the morning of 3 June 2021, someone (likely the Kamloops Band’s lawyer and former TRC counsel, Don Worme) phoned former TRC Chair Murray Sinclair complaining about the RCMP investigation.  Later that day Murray Sinclair addressed a meeting of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs and accused the RCMP of ‘intimidating people’ and of scaring Dr Beaulieu:

I understand that in British Columbia…. I got a call early this morning, in fact, saying that the RCMP have now declared that a major investigation is going to occur into the bodies that have been located in Kamloops, and they are now beginning to question those who have made this story available. Unfortunately, in the typical, heavy-handed and ham-handed police way, they are simply intimidating people, rather than helping them. We need to have a discussion with the police about how they’re handling it, because they should not be pursuing those who are revealing the information. They should, in fact, be looking at and looking for those records. They should be looking at what we know as opposed to trying to pursue witnesses.

The young lady who did the research on the ground-penetrating radar, for example, is quite scared of the approach that the RCMP have taken with her, and I don’t blame her. My advice to her—and others—has been to make sure she has legal counsel available to her so that she is not mistreated going forward.

Murray Sinclair pointedly told the Parliamentary Committee that ‘we need to have a discussion with the police about how they’re handling it’, and it appears that ‘discussion with the police’ did indeed take place because the next day, 4 June 2021, the RCMP announced that the Kamloops Band was now in charge of the investigation.

This was confirmed on 15 July 2021, when the Globe and Mail reported Chief Casimir as saying that the RCMP ‘have agreed to await further instruction from the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc’.

In other words, as soon as it became apparent that the Kamloops Band’s false claim to have discovered human remains needed to be investigated, the RCMP was forced, through Murray Sinclair’s intervention via a Parliamentary Committee, to turn the investigation over to the Kamloops Band and allow the Band to investigate its false claim itself!

Needless to say, this had predictable results.  No further investigation has taken place since 4 June 2021, the Kamloops Band has never retracted the false claim in its 27 May 2021 media release that ‘the remains of 215 children’ had been found, and Canada’s international reputation has been destroyed.

False ‘proofs’

The Kamloops Band attempted to bolster its false claim that human remains had been found by offering three false ‘proofs’ in a press release on 15 July 2021:

Between May 21-24th, 2021, 7000 square meters of land, was covered in the location that included the apple orchard in the Secwepemc Museum and Heritage Park. This area of interest was chosen for the survey based on a number of factors: 

• • Knowledge Keepers’ oral histories that recall “children as young as 6 years old being woken in the night to dig holes for burials in the apple orchard”, 

• • A juvenile rib bone that surfaced in the same survey area, and 

• • A juvenile tooth was excavated from a shovel test pit during an impact assessment conducted by Simon Fraser University’s archaeology department. (Note: a juvenile tooth is not an indicator of loss of life, but given both discoveries, this possibility should not be discounted.) 

In two and a half years the anonymous Knowledge Keepers have never come forward to be identified or tell their stories publicly.  It seems clear these Knowledge Keepers do not exist.

The Simon Fraser University Archaeology Department had found the alleged juvenile tooth to be non-human (a fact which was well known to the Kamloops Band), and the alleged juvenile rib bone was never tested and has apparently disappeared, a distinctly odd circumstance considering it was turned in to the Kamloops Band’s Museum, which is under the charge of Diena Jules.

So all three ‘proofs’ are worthless, and the offering of them as ‘proof’ that human remains had been found was deliberately misleading.

False acknowledgements

In addition to offering three false ‘proofs’, the Kamloops Band made two false ‘acknowledgements’ in its 27 May 2021 press release.

Firstly, the Band claimed that a grant had been given to it for GPR work:

We are thankful for the Pathway to Healing grant we received to undertake this important work. 

In fact the $40,000 Paths To Healing grant had been given to the Band by Canadian taxpayers through Heritage Canada for an entirely different purpose, and had already expired in November 2020, six months before Diena Jules and Ted Gottfriedson decided to use it (see attachment).  The Kamloops Band thus not only had no authority to use the grant for unauthorized GPR work, it had no authority to use it at all because it had expired.

Secondly, the press release made this entirely false and misleading ‘acknowledgement’:

In undertaking this current investigation, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief and Council would like to acknowledge the preliminary work that was carried out in the early 2000’s.

The idea that Dr George Nicholas’ work in the early 2000s was ‘preliminary’ to a search for clandestine burials of 215 possibly murdered residential school children is utterly preposterous.  The stated purposes of Dr Nicholas’ standard archaeological digs at that time are set out on his web page:

http://www.sfu.ca/archaeology/about/people/faculty/gnicholas.html

From 1991–2005, I developed and directed SFU’s Indigenous Archaeology Program on the Kamloops Indian Reserve. This community-based archaeology program was directed to (a) pre-5000 BP archaeological landscape, (b) investigating patterns of long-term land use; (c) the history of plant resource utilization in the Interior Plateau; and (d) Secwepemc heritage management needs.

The Kamloops Band knew full well its absurd statement that Dr Nicholas had been doing work in the early 2000s ‘preliminary’ to a search for clandestine burials was untrue.  In an interview with Rosemary Barton on 18 October 2021 Diena Jules took credit for organizing the GPR work, and stated that Dr Sarah Beaulieu had been brought in by a Kamloops Band employee, Leslie LeBourdais:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/kamloops-residential-school-trudeau-visit-1.6214412

DJ: Well, I’m, I’m right front and centre with all of this, all of the Language and Culture Department.  Um, we are, worked with Leslie LeBourdais to bring the ground-penetrating radar survey specialist in, Sarah Beaulieu, as well as Chief and Council.  So it was a lot of co-ordination with uh our manager, Ted Gottfriedson, and Jessica Arnouse, the Language Co-ordinator for the Department, and myself.  We did a lot of work in getting her here, and then preparing the ground, and then afterwards doing a lot of the cultural ceremonies. 

Leslie LeBourdais was a student of Dr Nicholas, and according to her curriculum vitae (copy attached), she actually worked with him on the 2002 dig in the apple orchard:

2002-Archaeology Field School, SCES/Simon Fraser University, Kamloops, BC.

Since the statement that Dr Nicholas was doing preliminary work in the early 2000s for an eventual search for clandestine burials of residential school children was so patently false, why did the Kamloops Band mention it, and why didn’t Dr Nicholas immediately set the record straight?

The answer to the first question is breathtakingly simple.  The Kamloops Band had to mention Dr Nicholas’ earlier archaeological digs because the Band already knew it was going to have to revise the number of 215 down to something closer to 200 because some of Dr Sarah Beaulieu’s GPR ‘hits’ were actually Dr Nicholas’ shovel test pits from his digs in the early 2000s.  Let that sink in.  The Kamloops Band put out the number 215 to the world when it already knew it was going to have to revise that number down to something smaller because Dr Sarah Beaulieu’s GPR work was so carelessly done that she had ‘discovered’ Dr Nicholas’ shovel test pits and categorized them as the clandestine burials of residential school children.

What went on behind the scenes between the Kamloops Band and the SFU Archaeology Department when that was discovered is unknown, but the results do not inspire confidence.  Firstly, Dr Nicholas has never publicly set the record straight.  Secondly, five archaeologists then reviewed Dr Sarah Beaulieu’s work, but not only have their reports not been made public, their identities have been kept a closely-guarded secret.  But most egregiously of all, the Kamloops Band’s lawyer silenced the entire SFU Archaeology Department.  Don Worme represented the Kamloops Band at the 15 July 2021 media event, and it appears he was the lawyer who contacted the Simon Fraser Archaeology Department in late July 2021 stating that they were not to talk about unmarked graves in Kamloops.  Email from Dr George Nicholas 28 July 2021:

‘I have 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. Their request extends to Dr. Cardoso and other members of our department.’

Why all these layers of deception?

It seems clear from Manny Jules’ comments to Stephen Dorsey on 2 May 2022 that the Kamloops Band saw the GPR results as an opportunity:

MJ: I attended the KIRS uh from Grade 1 to Grade 7, and then in, in 1968 we had what was called the integration, and of course ‘68 was a pivotal year for all of us who were uh, you know, racial, if you will, uh right across North America.  Uh, and so, for me it was absolutely personal.  Uh, I got a phone call uh from my sister [Jeanette Jules] who was on Council.  I was having what we called ‘cowboy coffee’.  So because of covid we were having coffee outside around a campfire.  And I, my sister said, ‘The Chief and Council want to meet with you and the other former Chiefs’.  And I said, ‘Well, jeez I’m having cowboy coffee.  I’d sooner do this than attend a meeting’.  And she said, ‘No, it’s really important that you come here’.  And I said, ‘Well, what’s the reason?’  And she said, ‘It’s been confirmed.  We’ve got uh 215 possible unmarked graves’.  And I knew immediately that this was really important so I dropped what I was doing and went over, met with the Chief and Council.  And I knew immediately it was going to be global news uh, and that it was going to really impact the rest of our lives, what had happened, but also what had happened, and why it happened.  And that’s when I really was reflecting on, my emotion was, ‘All of these things that we’ve known about and talked about for many years uh are now at the forefront, and people can no longer deny what had happened’.  Yeah, up until that point I always had the feeling that people thought it was our fault that we lived in substandard housing, that we were economically, you know, oppressed, that it was our fault because you know we didn’t work hard enough, we didn’t. . . .

It seems leaking false information to the media was considered justified in terms of achieving the objective Manny Jules outlines in those comments – making fellow Canadians realize ‘It’s not our fault’ because look what Canadians did to these 215 children.

But the fact is that Canadians did nothing to these 215 children because they’re phantoms, figments of the Kamloops Band’s imagination.  They never existed.  No remains have been found.  Dr Sarah Beaulieu didn’t do her homework.  In addition to mistaking Dr Nicholas’ shovel test pits for burials of murdered children, she mistook the shallow trenches of an old septic field installed in 1924 to dispose of the school’s sewage for children’s graves.

The idea that a sewage septic field is being honoured as the ‘sacred burial ground’ of residential school children is repugnant.

And the idea that Canada’s international reputation has been destroyed over a sewage septic field is equally repugnant.

The RCMP were taken off the investigation as a result of Murray Sinclair’s complaint to the Parliamentary Committee on 3 June 2021, and it’s now up to Parliament to put the RCMP back on the job.  The idea that the Kamloops Band, which is the source of so many false and misleading statements in its press releases, should be investigating itself makes a mockery of the Canadian justice system.

Nina Green