For longer than anyone can remember, Lac Ste. Anne has been associated with miracles and spiritual redemption, and for more than a century, it has been a place of pilgrimage, bringing Indigenous and Catholic traditions, and Indigenous and settler peoples by the thousands, every year, on the Feast of Saint Anne, on July 26.

In his “apostolic voyage” to Canada arising from last year’s upheavals over the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the ghastly legacy of this country’s Indian residential schools, Pope Francis will conduct a prayer service at the lake on Saint Anne’s feast day, after he celebrates mass at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, about 80 kilometres away.By July 26, it will be 14 months since a series of shocking and erroneous headlines about a “mass grave” discovered at the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to lower the flags on federal buildings throughout Canada. There were marches and statue-topplings, and quite a few similarly unconfirmed stories about other residential-school grave sites.

Indeed, the Tk’emlúps people never claimed to have discovered a “mass grave.” And after all this time, there’s still no easily summoned evidence to show with any certainty that any children were secretly buried in an orchard adjacent to the long-shuttered residential school in Kamloops, B.C., let alone in a mass grave.“Further steps are being taken,” Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir told me this week. “We’re also working with a team that will be looking at some of those next steps, and there’s also, most importantly, we’re going to be working on an outreach to all the communities impacted by the Kamloops Indian Residential School, so that’s basically about it at this time.“We’re going to be getting together to really start mapping out what those next steps will be, but right now, this is too preliminary.”

In May 2021, Chief Casimir announced that a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey had picked up 215 anomalies that appeared to confirm stories about residential-school children being buried in an orchard near the school, one of the largest residential schools in Canada. The number of possible burials was later reduced to 200, and the GPR technician stressed that nothing could be said for certain unless and until the area was excavated.Within the T’Kemlups community, there’s a growing impatience with the process. But as former chief Manny Jules explained to me, the decisions are not for T’Kemlups people to make on their own. There are jurisdictional issues involved, because the children who attended the school came from dozens of Indigenous communities throughout British Columbia’s southern interior.

Jules, one of Canada’s most prominent Indigenous leaders and currently the chief commissioner of the First Nations Tax Commission, stressed that only Chief Casimir can speak on behalf of the T’Kemlups people. But Jules confirmed that 14 major families within the community have made it known to the chief and council that an excavation, or exhumation, should begin as soon as possible.“To our knowledge, the children who may be buried there are not of our community,” Jules said. “If children died who were members of T’Kemlups, they would have been buried in our own graveyard.” It is not clear whether any T’Kemlups children who attended the residential school are “missing” from the record.The issue has become complicated by a report anonymously prepared by an architectural consultant who specializes in site inspections, which suggests that the anomalies picked up by the T’Kemlups GPR survey are likely the result of decades of ground disturbances — irrigation ditches, utility lines, backhoe trenches, archeological digs, waterlines and so on. The report has been made available to the T’Kemlups chief and council.

I spoke with the report’s author and confirmed his background. He said he wants to remain anonymous because his company does work with First Nations and he doesn’t want to cause controversy. He only took an interest in the story about the discovery of unmarked graves at the Kamloops school because the labelling of the GPR anomalies as “probable” burials didn’t seem to add up.At least a third of the orchard area has been extensively disturbed and excavated over the years, and he said any anomalies would “probably” be attributable to those disturbances. And over the decades of excavation in the immediate area of the orchard, no human remains were ever found, he said. He agrees with the GPR specialist retained by T’Kemlups, Sarah Beaulieu, that it can’t be said for certain whether there are any burials in the area, unless and until the site is excavated.

Jules seemed to agree, as well saying that, “If there are little ones there, we have to find out.”