In May 2021, the Kamloops First Nation announced the discovery of 215 burial sites near a former residential school—a claim that sparked global headlines about “mass graves” and left Ottawa’s flag at half mast for five months.
We now know this was a mistake. A group of researchers, myself included, published Grave Error, laying out the reasons for skepticism. The ground-penetrating radar (GPR) results had almost certainly been misread, confusing thousands of feet of buried weeping tile in the orchard with human burials.
