As Rodney Clifton points out, the residential school grave controversy has morphed from an investigation of the actual extent of an alleged crime into a well-funded exercise in browbeating “colonial” society in perpetuity.

The realists began questioning the official narrative when “215 children’s bodies were discovered” by ground penetrating radar (GPR) in the Kamloops Indian Residential School yard. One of the realists examined the historical records and discovered that in the mid-1920s, clay pipes for a septic field were buried in the surveyed area.

As a result, the realists wondered if the GPR had re-discovered the clay pipes and not the graves of IRS students. To date, Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc (formerly the Kamloops Indian Band) has not released the GPR report, and it has not allowed excavations to see what the GPR had picked up.

Surprisingly, none of the 94 calls to action demand that school yards should be searched for the bodies of murdered and buried IRS children. This is important because the commission worked for six years, spent over $60 million, and did not report credible evidence that children had been murdered and buried in residential school yards.