Some of them may be hollows in the soil created by other causes—methods like ground-penetrating radar don’t have a fine enough resolution to figure out what exactly is in the detected locations, and there’s been no money to excavate. However, given that we have a whole bunch of missing human remains out there somewhere, and these sites were investigated as likely locations for them, it’s likely that the majority are, in fact, graves. If not, there are graves somewhere else that we still need to find.

As of April 2025, no bodies have been exhumed from the suspected gravesites, largely due to a lack of community consensus on whether to investigate detected anomalies at the risk of disturbing burials. As of January 2024, at least three official excavations had been performed with no bodies discovered, though at least one excavation only investigated a portion of the reported ground anomalies at that site.

Disputes regarding the conclusiveness of the evidence has helped spawn a movement of denialism about the existence of some or all residential school burial sites. Indigenous groups and academics have dismissed claims of a “mass grave hoax”, saying that claimed discoveries of mass graves were present in a minority of stories published by mainstream media and that there had been public misinterpretation of what had actually been announced in 2021. Federal Justice Minister David Lametti said in 2023 that he was open to outlawing residential school denialism. His successor, Arif Virani, has not taken a position on the issue.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_gravesites