Did Tanya Talaga and Murray Sinclair stop the RCMP investigation into the Kamloops Band’s false claim that it had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children’?
The sequence of events suggests that that was the case.
In Chapter Two of her new book, The Knowing, Tanya Talaga writes that on 25 May 2021 she received an email from the Kamloops Band’s media contact, Racelle Kooy, with an embargoed copy of the Band’s media release falsely claiming that the Band had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children’.
Talaga contacted Kooy, and travelled to Kamloops, arriving shortly after the Kamloops Band had sent out its media release which shocked the world via a ‘scoop’ given to James Peters of CFJC Today, who at 4:01 on 27 May 2021 tweeted a link to his article time-stamped 3:59 p.m.
During her first few days in Kamloops, Talaga says Racelle Kooy was fielding calls from media all over the world and telling people to stay away. Talaga’s account continues:
There would be no media at this time, except those select few who, like me, were invited. How could there be?
As a Globe columnist, I was also fielding questions, but they were coming from the Globe’s Parliament Hill bureau. On one of my first nights there, my editor called me. It was late, and I was in my hotel room, exhausted. She apologized for what she was about to ask me and then she said, “The Prime Minister’s Office, the RCMP, is questioning the numbers – the 215.” There was more. “There is talk that there is internal strife in the community.” . . . .
I told my editor that what she heard was categorically not true. The number was correct. And furthermore, that I had not seen any division. In fact, I’d seen the exact opposite: unity. She said she’d tell everyone what I’d said, and she apologized for having to be the messenger. We hung up.
My head was spinning, but I had one clear thought: we needed Murray Sinclair. Tk’emlups needed Murray, former senator and the former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or TRC. He was my next call.
When I reached him, I told him what was occurring, what I was seeing. He said, “You are in the eye of the storm now. Be careful.”
According to Murray Sinclair, Talaga contacted him by phone early on the morning of 3 June 2021. Later that morning, Sinclair harshly criticized the RCMP investigation to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs, saying:
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 [Dr Sarah Beaulieu] 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.
Sinclair told Parliament that ‘We need to have a discussion with the police about how they’re handling it’. It appears that discussion with the police took place immediately, because a few hours later, on the evening of 3 June 2021, according to an article published at 6:51 p.m. by James Peters of CFJC Today – the same James Peters who had released the Kamloops Band’s false claim to the world via a tweet at 4:01 p.m. on 27 May 2021 – Staff Sergeant Bill Wallace of the RCMP detachment on the Kamloops reserve distributed a statement saying the RCMP investigation had been turned over to the Kamloops Band, which would now be the ‘lead agency’.
Peters’ news article of 3 June 2021 reads in full:
RCMP open file, pledge to support Tk’emlups te Secwepemc on residential school discovery
Jun 3, 2021 | 6:51 PM
TK’EMLUPS — The Tk’emlups Rural RCMP detachment has opened a file related to the discovery of children’s remains near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
In a news release distributed Thursday evening (June 3), Detachment Commander Staff Sgt. Bill Wallace says officers have met with Tk’emlups te Secwepemc leaders since the discovery was announced on May 27.
“The Tk’emlúps Rural RCMP has attended the site, participated in meetings, and will continue working closely with the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc community leaders in determining the next steps and the best way to be involved in any investigative avenues explored going forward, while at the same time being supportive, respectful, and culturally sensitive to the indigenous communities that are impacted,” said Wallace.
Tk’emlups Chief Rosanne Casimir revealed last Thursday that ground-penetrating radar has revealed the location of the remains of 215 children, believed to have been students at the residential school.
Wallace says RCMP met with Tk’emlups officials on Monday (May 31) and confirmed the First Nation is the lead agency in relation to the discovery. He notes the detachment will continue to support the Tk’emlups in determining next steps.
by James Peters
It appears Staff Sgt Wallace’s statement was not posted on the Kamloops RCMP’s Newsroom website by the Kamloops RCMP’s media relations officer, but was instead distributed directly to the media. In an article on 4 June 2021, the CBC’s Angela Sterritt stated that Staff Sergeant Wallace had sent his statement to the CBC:
In a statement to the CBC, Staff Sgt. Bill Wallace said “the Tk’emlúps Rural RCMP has attended the site, participated in meetings and will continue working closely with the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc community leaders in determining the next steps and the best way to be involved in any investigative avenues explored going forward.”
In fact no copy of Staff Sgt Wallace’s statement appears to have ever been published in entirety, or to have been seen by anyone apart from the CBC’s Angela Sterritt, CFJC today’s James Peters, and a few other hand-picked sympathetic journalists.
More might have been learned about it during Chief Casimir’s video press conference the following day, 4 June 2021, had the live-streaming of the video conference by APTN News been allowed to proceed. However at the last minute live-streaming was forbidden by Racelle Kooy, who told journalists that:
you’re going to want to delve into places that we’re not ready to talk about for a multitude of reasons. We are a First Nations community. We are part of the Secwepemc Nation, which means we have ceremonies and protocols to do yet. So you have to understand that there’s things that we’re not going to disclose until we’ve had the chance to connect within our own community who is reeling because unfortunately how the story was we knew that we had to push it out the same time to the general public as to our own community here, and so they’re still reeling, and they still have the presence of those children in their community, so we just want you to be very aware with what we’re dealing with here.
There was also a question asked about if you could livestream this event out. Please, no. When we want to livestream we’re going to control the when and where of livestream. We understand you’re going to be recording this or aspects of this for your whatever, your radio or TV or whatever, with um Kukpi Rosanne, but we’re not, you’re, we’re not giving anyone permission to live stream this at this time.
Again, and that is about us and every part, and I appreciate that so many of you have been respectful about consent, because again, we need to maintain control here, not because it’s about our egos. It’s because it’s so sensitive in nature.
As noted in a recent article in the National Catholic Register, now – more than three years later – the Kamloops Band has finally admitted it did not find ‘the remains of 215 children’, but merely ‘215 anomalies’. On 18 May 2024 the Band posted this announcement on its website:
On May 27, 2021, it was with a heavy heart that Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc confirmed an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. With the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of 215 anomalies were detected.
Would Canadians have had to wait more than three years to learn that the Kamloops Band had found nothing apart from soil disturbances (almost certainly from a septic field installed in 1924 to dispose of the school’s sewage) had Tanya Talaga not phoned Murray Sinclair when people in Ottawa started questioning the Kamloops ‘discovery’, and had Murray Sinclair not criticized the RCMP investigation to a Parliamentary Committee?
Would Indigenous people across Canada have been spared the trauma which has resulted from the false Kamloops claim and the many other fruitless GPR searches which have followed upon the false Kamloops claim had Tanya Talaga and Murray Sinclair not interfered in the RCMP investigation?
Would Canada be a better place today if Tanya Talaga and Murray Sinclair had not prevented the RCMP from putting a speedy end to the false claim by the Kamloops Band that it had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children’?
While considering those questions, Canadians should not forget that it was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself, under Chairman Murray Sinclair and Executive Director Kimberly Murray, which gave rise in the first place to the false claim that there were thousands of missing Indian residential school children in Canada with the ‘Missing Children and Unmarked Burials’ volume of the TRC’s final report, yet now – almost a decade later – Canadian have still not been given the name of a single verifiably-identified missing Indian residential school child.
Nina Green