Canadian Press names Kamloops unmarked grave discovery Canada's news story of the year
CBC
WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.
The discovery of unmarked graves at a former residential school in the B.C. Interior and the countrywide awakening it set off have been chosen as Canada's news story of the year by editors in newsrooms across the country.
There were 38 editors in the annual Canadian Press survey who picked the grim discovery at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School as the most compelling and deeply revealing story of 2021. That compared with 31 votes for Canada's COVID-19 vaccine rollout and 13 for climate change and B.C. weather that saw massive fires in the summer and floods in the fall.
"The announcement of unmarked children's graves shook most Canadians to their core, even if this information was not new to many First Nations people," said Christina Spencer, Ottawa Citizen editorial pages editor.
"Non-Indigenous Canadians now want to know more about the 'hidden' history of this country and that can only be a good thing."
The story broke last May when the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation in Kamloops said a section of land was searched at the former school with ground-penetrating radar and found what were believed to be the remains of up to 215 children. Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Chief Rosanne Casimir said then that they had "a knowing" in their community that the missing children were undocumented deaths.
"It was horrifying, yet at the same time…it was surreal, it was painful learning of the confirmation of the missing children," Casimir told Shelley Joyce on CBC's Daybreak Kamloops.
The Kamloops Indian Residential School operated between 1890 and 1969, when the federal government took over its operations from the Catholic Church and ran it as a day school until it closed in 1978.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 4,000-page report detailed mistreatment at Canada's residential schools, including emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children, and at least 4,100 deaths at the institutions. Canada had more than 130 residential schools, with the last one closing in 1996.
Even with that commission finding of thousands of deaths at the schools, many editors who participated in the survey said the discovery of the unmarked graves served as a chilling, consciousness-raising event about Indigenous struggles in Canada.
"The initial discovery of 215 unmarked graves at a former residential school in Kamloops seemed to shake the Canadianness out of Canada," said Dawn Walton, managing editor at CTV Calgary.
"Despite all the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it was this revelation, and subsequent discoveries of other unmarked graves, that really made Canadians stop and recognize there is more yet to be done."
The story made headlines around the world. Across the country, other First Nations began looking for lost children using the same technology.
Chief Cadmus Delorme of Saskatchewan's Cowessess First Nation said ground-penetrating radar used near the Marieval Indian Residential School discovered 751 unmarked graves, of which 300 have now been identified.
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