I've not actually encountered the terms "hoax" or "lie" or even suggestions per se of intentionally misleading. Though I don't read the right-wing trash. I am quite willing to believe many, maybe all of the people involved, in the work here with ground-penetrating radar blips believes they have discovered unmarked graves of indigenous children who attended residential schools.

Still, as the article says:

[GPR] cannot confirm the presence of remains or identify who was buried where

So, how many of those blips are actually bodies? If the number doesn't matter, then why do we keep counting?

As the article also says, at least 4000 children are well-documented as having died needlessly in the residential school system. I personally suspect the real number is much larger, and I also agree we'll never really know.

I'm old enough to remember the world-wide tizzy over GPR showing undiscovered, networked burial chamber complexes at the Great Pyramids near Giza. They did start digging there, and it was variations in sand density.

Being a literal-minded person, I attach the disclaimer above to every story about GPR findings. A lot of people do, I imagine. I know many of them actually are bodies. We've found too many actual ones for most of them not to be. I can check the cynicism created by this.

But a lot of people don't check their cynicism. It runs wild. The unseriousness ("errors of journalistS" as the CBC puts it) of our media, the unwillingness to handle the complexity of this, our societal attention span being that of gnats, means minor apparent contradictions like that destroy credibility. It's not unlike what we saw with COVID-19. The unreality of exact numbers. Precisely measuring what we can't really know. Somehow that becomes soundbite gotchas enabling reactionary pushback.