So I really, really don’t want to be that guy, but it’s important to discuss that the numbers are still pretty uncertain. See this comment from a few months ago, for example, which highlights some of the issues.

Furthermore, the unmarked graves are not so much unmarked graves as they are graveyards which used to have markings but which now no longer do. These sites were well known to their respective local communities before the enormous news and headline eruptions of the last year. Part of the reason many of these are unmarked today is because out in the prairies especially, headstones were historically very expensive and difficult to acquire. Wooden crosses were erected for the dead — a practice that was still common out that way until around the 1960s, I believe, for virtually everyone. So basically all of the graves were actually marked in the past, and the crosses removed after they deteriorated. Nothing out of the norm for old graveyards. Cadmus Delorme, Chief of the Cowessess First Nation, has even publicly asked people to stop calling these “mass graves” because they simply aren’t what those words imply, but rather just regular graveyards, albeit unmarked.

Speaking of virtually everyone — one of the major problems I personally have had with all this news is that many of the news sites/stations even misreported these as mass graves. Mass grave implies mass murder, and bodies being callously dumped into a hole in the ground. This is not the case for a single one of these sites, and furthermore, many of them are/were normal community graveyards used by peoples of both white settler and indigenous extraction, adults and children alike. Furthermore, to date insofar as I am aware, not a single body has been confirmed as a specifically indigenous child, partly because exhumations have not been made, and because the ground penetrating radar can often even misread tree roots in a similar way to human bodies. And those numbers are the graveyard totals, many of which may very well be of deceased white people who were local to those community graveyards.

Was residential schooling wrong? Absolutely, yes. Were its intentions wrong and did they pursue a policy of intentional cultural genocide? Once again, absolutely yes. But do we know everything clearly enough to determine how many children died? Actually unfortunately no, we do not know that. Hopefully that can be conclusively determined in the future, but for now, there is actually and sadly a shocking amount of misinformation out there revolving around this issue. And there are still other things out there surrounding the issue which need to be further investigated too.