OP-ED: What do funding reversals for Indigenous burial searches mean?
https://tnc.news/2024/08/18/rubenstein-what-do-funding-reversals-for-indigenous-burial-searches-mean/
The federal government is facing severe and widespread criticism for cutting funding to search for the remains of Indigenous children said to have never returned home from their residential schools.
The Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund (RSMCCSF) allowed organizations and communities to receive up to $3 million per year for an unspecified number of years. Now, the funding has been capped at $500,000 annually, a six-fold cut—significantly lower than what Indigenous organizations claim is required to continue their work.
The RSMCCSF was established in 2021 as a $321 million knee-jerk reaction to the disputed May 27, 2021, Kamloops Indian Band’s announcement of “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” buried next to the long closed institution.
No such “confirmation” has ever taken place either at Kamloops or elsewhere because only excavation of alleged burial plots can do so. Such excavation has rarely been undertaken, presumably because it has always yielded inconclusive or unproblematic results.
Still, this has not prevented 146 funding agreements providing more than $216.5 million to indigenous communities and organizations to support “community-led and Survivor-centric initiatives to document, locate and commemorate the children that did not return home [sic] and unmarked burial sites associated with former residential schools” as of March 31, 2024.
None of these agreements required excavation to confirm ground penetrating radar (GPR) results, a crude search tool that can determine only subterranean soil disturbances. 'Continue…