Reporters like the Leader-Post’s Alec Salloum even went above and beyond the duty of simply recording the event, noting the findings were of cold comfort to survivors who attended Fort Pelly and St. Philip’s Indian Residential Schools 300 kilometres northeast of Regina and their descendants.
Herein lies the biggest problem as we try to reconcile the truth of residential schools — the need to question without proper context, or without any context. Were all the ground-penetrating hits really graves? Were they all graves of children who attended residential schools or did they belong to others in the communities that just happened to be buried there? Is that the supposed number of children who died from alleged abuses or did some die of pneumonia, mumps, smallpox, Spanish flu, etc. that could have taken their lives even they were left with their parents?Stop. Enough nonsense.
The more we downplay such realities, the more we validate the destructive narrative, the more we accept, that these kids were just numbers.