My Life in Two Indian Residential Schools
"the Dorchester Review published “The False Narrative of Residential School Burials” by University of Calgary professor emeritus Tom Flanagan and retired Manitoba judge Brian Giesbrecht. “There is no record,” they wrote, “of a single student being murdered at a residential school – never mind thousands – in the 113-year history of residential schools. Nor – and this is key – are there any records of Indigenous parents claiming that their children went to residential schools ‘never to be seen again.’” Critically, they noted, “Where excavation has taken place after [ground-penetrating radar] searches, nothing has been found – no human remains, no graves.” In a similar vein, Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology who is devoted to truth and fairness for Indigenous people, created a Substack called The REAL Indian Residential Schools Newsletter to further the reassessment of the accumulating evidence.
Most prominently, in June the National Post’s Terry Glavin produced a long essay focusing on the exaggerated interpretations and distortions triggered by the various announcements...
Still, no mainstream account of which I’m aware has yet challenged the underlying premise of residential schools as consistently awful, rife with disease, neglect and abuse, a sinister system established to expunge Indigenous language and culture and, by forcibly separating Indian children from their unwilling parents, bring about their total assimilation into “white” culture. The National Post’s recent defence of Glavin’s essay (following a number of unconscionable attacks upon his character), was entitled “Residential school horrors need no embellishment” and devoted hundreds of words to reinforcing essentially every aspect of the widely accepted narrative of the schools. This included the declaration that “Residential schools inflicted immense harm on Canada’s Indigenous people” plus the assertion that 70 percent of pupils in some schools suffered sexual abuse.
People across Canada and even around the world seem to believe that Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were an unmitigated failure from the time the first school was supported by government funds in 1883 until the last school was closed in 1996. It has become virtually suicidal for anyone holding public office or in a senior position of any kind, including in universities and the media, to question this narrative. Its establishment in the national psyche has made it easier to propound the even more incendiary claims that children at these schools were not only mistreated but in hundreds or even thousands of cases were murdered, their bodies callously dumped in the dead of night in unmarked graves.
Still the question remains: is the dominant view of Indian Residential Schools true?
Throughout the thousands of articles written on these institutions, there have been few if any stories from people – Indigenous or non-Indigenous – who personally worked in the schools. Surely their experiences are worth considering. Their work, their character and their alleged actions are all being maligned in the mainstream and social media even though their names are rarely, if ever, mentioned. As such, I will briefly tell my story – what I saw with my own eyes and experienced first-hand...
In most cases, the schoolchildren went home on weekends, which was common in residential schools in southern Canada.
Present-day media reports describe residential schools as typically being in isolated locations, generally far from communities, putting the children completely out of touch from their families for years at a time. This implies that it would have been easy to abuse the kids and conceal the nefarious activities. In fact, the Siksika Reserve is only a few kilometres south of the Trans-Canada Highway close to the towns of Strathmore, Gleichen and Cluny and, to repeat, the residential school was on reserve land, so most of the children maintained continuous family connections while in Old Sun. Similarly, the now-infamous Kamloops reserve is situated directly next to the city of Kamloops and the residential school, too, was on reserve land and close to most of the students’ families.
My responsibilities in the Agency Office were to greet people who came for information, answer the phone, type correspondence and reports, and file them. After a few days, I realized that about 50 percent of the employees were Siksika, and the Siksika language was routinely spoken in the Office. In fact, the Siksika employees and visitors were eager to teach me to speak Blackfoot. Often they greeted me in Siksika, and were delighted when I responded.
This was not my first experience with Indigenous people. I had attended a small high school with a few Indigenous students. This was the first time, however, that I was a minority person. I was warmly welcomed by the Siksika, and I formed very positive impressions of the people and the Indigenous and non-Indigenous workers in Old Sun and the Agency Office. It was obvious that the Siksika were holding onto their language and culture while adapting to the broader culture of southern Alberta...
I helped a group of Siksika men set up the tipis for the annual Sun Dance. People came from as far away as Saskatchewan and Montana to participate in this important cultural ceremony. If the federal government’s goal was to expunge Indigenous culture and wipe out their language and ceremonies, it certainly wasn’t happening on the Siksika Reserve in the mid-60s...
No one at the time reported that any children who had attended Old Sun
Anglican Residential School or Crowfoot Roman Catholic Residential
School were missing. In fact, throughout my subsequent time working on
reserves and interacting with Siksika people, I never heard of any
children missing from any residential school.
Before the end of June, Mr. Muir, the guidance counsellor, and I travelled around the First Nation to register children for the coming school year. We registered a few hundred children, and their parents signed registration forms agreeing to have their children attend specific schools. The forms were filed at the Agency Office, and the federal Department of Indian Affairs paid for the students’ education if they went to either a residential school or to a public school in a nearby community. The registration activities in which I participated were entirely counter to the current narrative which holds that tens of thousands of Indigenous children were forcibly or even violently removed from their homes and taken to residential schools, causing untold grief and suffering for the children and their families.
The school registration arrangements – including the willing participation and informed consent of the kids’ parents – created the near certainty that if any child went missing, a substantial number of people would quickly know what had occurred. At that time, children were bussed to off-reserve schools by Siksika bus drivers, and surely the bus drivers would have reported any children who were missing to the Chief and Band Counsellors or to the Indian Agent.
While living in Old Sun, I attended church services in the chapel. I also attended a couple of funerals and observed burials at Canon Stockham Anglican cemetery, which lay just a couple of kilometres southwest of the school. It was obvious that between 80 and 90 percent of the graves were unmarked, which accords with current news reports of unmarked graves on other reserves. But there is a benign explanation. Generally, Indigenous people do not mark graves with head stones, which is a Christian ritual, so most have wooden crosses and small plastic funeral-home markers. Over time, the crosses and markers deteriorated or got misplaced. (The percentage of unmarked graves is about the same today.)
That summer I began to date a young Siksika woman, Elaine Ayoungman. We fell in love, were married in 1968 and have been together for almost 54 years. Elaine attended Old Sun Residential School for 10 years. Her parents, Arthur and Nora, had attended the same school for eight years. Neither Elaine nor her parents had heard of children going to school and not returning home. I am sure that if this had happened, most parents would have reported the names of missing children to the school principal, the Indian Agent, the Chief and Band Council, and the RCMP without delay.
Here is a story I heard about 40 years ago that will give readers an idea of the care and respect shown towards parents by Old Sun’s principal. In the early 1950s, Elaine’s older sister, Rosella, was in grade 3 or 4. One morning she vomited into her porridge, and the girls’ supervisor told her that she still had to eat it. When she went home on Friday, Rosella told her parents what had happened. Her father, Arthur, and grandfather met with the principal/priest on Sunday when they attended church and brought the children back to school. On Tuesday morning, less than a week after the incident, the supervisor who had forced Rosella to eat her vomit was on a train back to Ontario where she had lived.
By the middle of August I still had not been paid the stipend that Indian Affairs had promised and I did not have enough money to pay for room and board at Old Sun or to return to university for the next academic year. The young men who eventually became my brothers-in-law joked that now I knew how their ancestors had felt after they signed Treaty 7! By then I knew that this was a typical Blackfoot joke...
Parents would eat meals in the staff dining room along with their children. During meals they would use their native language. Indigenous staff members who spoke the same language would often sit at the table and participate in the conversation.
About 50 percent of Stringer Hall’s staff were Indigenous, including two young Inuk women, Annie and Lucy, who were responsible for supervising the junior boys and girls. As readers would probably expect, they spoke Inuktitut to the Inuk children...
No children went missing or passed away at either Old Sun or Stringer Hall when I was living in those residences. Yet, I learned of four children from the two residences who died before or after my time there. These deaths need an explanation.
In March 1962, three young girls ran away from Old Sun during a blizzard. They fought their way through the blowing snow to a house where one of the girls lived at a place called “Four Corners,” which was about 1 kilometre from the school. The parents told the girls that they had to walk back to Old Sun while the storm was raging. The girls went out into the blizzard and two of them, Mabel Crane Bear and Belinda Raw Eater, froze to death.
On June 23, 1972, six years after I left Inuvik, three children ran away from Stringer Hall, trying to walk to Tuktoyaktuk, about 150 kilometers to the north. Two boys, Dennis Dick and Jack Elanik, died...
While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would much later claim that these children had run away only because of the abuse they had suffered, no one actually knows why they did so. The most likely explanation, in my opinion, is that children often make hasty decisions without clearly thinking through the possible consequences. I never heard that the children ran away because they were being abused in the residences. Of course, all four children were given Christian funerals. ..
Most of the residential schools that I visited or heard about had cemeteries close by because the school chapel was also the parish church for local families. Indigenous and non-Indigenous parishioners were often interred side-by-side in these cemeteries. As mentioned above, I have seen that Indigenous parishioners often leave the graves of family members unmarked except for wooden crosses and small plastic funeral-home tags which, over time, deteriorate or are lost. As a result, many cemeteries close to residential schools have numerous unmarked graves. But the deaths themselves were always known and duly recorded, and the deceased were buried after a proper and respectful Christian funeral service.
As a result of my experience and personal observation, I have great difficulty believing that hundreds, let alone thousands, of children died at residential schools and were buried in schoolyards without proper funerals or official documentation. (I remain prepared to change my mind if shown compelling evidence.) These claims have, nevertheless, caused a great deal of trauma among present-day Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians alike, while costing Canadian taxpayers many millions of dollars. I’m afraid that if we do not ferret out the truth, similar claims will likely cost much more in the future.
I am also concerned that when credible evidence is finally published, based on an analysis of the records and physical excavation, and if no Indian Resident School students are confirmed to have been secretly buried in unmarked graves without official documentation, the gulf between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians will become much wider and more difficult to bridge. If this happens, Canada will have drifted even further from – rather than closer to – reconciliation. This would be contrary to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission claimed to have intended."
A Media-Fueled Social Panic Over Unmarked Graves
"Contrary to what many Canadians came to believe during that heady period, GPR survey data doesn’t yield X-ray-style images that show bodies or coffins. What it typically shows are disruptions in soil and sediment. Investigators then need to dig up the ground to determine what actually lies underneath.
But those details were swept aside during what, in retrospect, appears to have been a true nation-wide social panic. As other Indigenous groups announced that they’d be conducting their own GPR surveys, media figures confidently asserted that the original Canadian Residential-School student death-toll estimate of 3,201 would soon double or even triple. One op-ed writer went so far as to declare that “the discovery of the graves of the children in Kamloops may be Canada’s Holocaust moment.” Dramatic, tear-drenched acts of public atonement unfolded everywhere, with many July 1st Canada Day celebrations being either cancelled or transformed into opportunities for morose self-laceration...
headline writers mostly skipped over the technical bits about soil dislocations and such, and went straight to “bodies” and “graves.” And the stories often were interspersed with credulous recitations of dubious tales featuring live babies being thrown into furnaces or buried alive...
Canadians were being told that the old orchard in Kamloops where the GPR data had been collected was a crime scene—a site of mass murder, and the final resting place of 215 child homicide victims. As I’ve reasoned elsewhere: If you told Canadians that, say, 215 murdered white children were buried somewhere in Toronto, or Ottawa, or Vancouver, there’d be investigators and police crawling all over the place, looking for remains that could be tested and identified. And so I naturally assumed the same thing soon would be happening in Kamloops.
Many of the abuses identified at the Kamloops Residential School and others like it date to the early decades of the Cold War. This means that some of the perpetrators of these claimed child homicides—that is, the staff who worked at these schools—could still be alive. Perhaps their crimes might even be studied and solved by inspecting the bones of children buried alongside one another. Surely, no effort would be spared to pull evidence from the ground immediately, so that criminal cases could be prosecuted before the passage of time allowed the killers to escape accountability for their racist bloodbath.
But then the weeks and months passed in 2021. Spring turned to summer, then summer to fall, and fall to winter, and … nothing happened. It’s now been 14 months since the original announcement was made about presumed graves in Kamloops, and no physical evidence has been unearthed. No graves. No corpses. No human remains. In fact, as far as I can tell, there doesn’t even seem to be any systematic effort by police or First Nations leaders to commence such investigations. Eventually, it began to strike the general public that this was a very odd way to treat a mass murder scene, even as pundits and politicians refused to change their early, apocalyptic tone.
Which brings us back to that CBC announcement in December, which informed us that “the discovery of unmarked graves” had been Canada’s biggest news story of 2021. That very statement encoded the polite lie, which most Canadian journalists have been encouraged to repeat in one form or another, that some known number of “unmarked graves” had well and truly been “discovered.” The truth was (and remains) that the number of confirmed graves remains at zero. No one, to my knowledge, has found any human remains—i.e., body parts or tissue from decaying corpses—either at Kamloops or any of the other former Residential Schools, through the use of GPR.
So yes, the story did arguably qualify as “Canada’s news story of the year”—but not insofar as it was a story about graves. Rather, it turned out to be a story about the herd behaviour of Canada’s intellectual class. Thousands of politicians, writers, broadcasters, and activists spent months crowd-sourcing the creation of a completely unsupported national narrative, and then failed to correct the record once their rush to judgment had run headlong into reality.
I’ve been in journalism for a quarter century, and have witnessed plenty of bizarre controversies within my trade. But I’ve never witnessed anything similar to this phenomenon. It’s like one of those case-studies in mass hysteria and popular delusion that you read about in history books.
Some dissenting voices did begin popping up in 2022, however. In February, Frances Widdowson, then a liberal arts professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary, wrote an article for a conservative US publication explaining how far-fetched rumours and urban legends dating to the 1980s seem to have informed the most lurid claims concerning the Kamloops Residential School. A small publication called the Dorchester Review published a scathing article by Quebec academic Jacques Rouillard, entitled “In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found.” And in May, most significantly, a large newspaper called National Post published a blockbuster exposé by a well-known columnist, Terry Glavin, going blow by blow through the scandalously botched media treatment that’s fuelled the unmarked-graves story since it first broke in the spring of 2021. As Glavin took pains to emphasize, the main reason the story was bungled was that journalists got it wrong, not that Indigenous leaders lied about what they believed.
Glavin’s piece was a watershed, as it represented the first explicit acknowledgement from a mainstream Canadian news outlet that the original narrative we’d all been asked to parrot in 2021 was unsustainable. And predictably, Glavin paid a price for speaking up. When it was announced that he’d be interviewed about his story for a well-known Toronto-based podcast, the chair of Canada’s national arts funding agency, Jesse Wente, publicly intervened in an apparent bid to prevent the interview from going forward. (The host responded to this extraordinary development by sheepishly assuring Wente that he’d assign the segment to another interviewer.)...
As for Widdowson, her university fired her after she spoke out about unmarked-graves misinformation circulating in Canadian university circles. And Prof. Rouillard’s article in the Dorchester Review attracted condemnation from no less an official than the federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller, who denounced any expressed skepticism of the pre-set graves narrative as “ghoulish” and “retraumatizing for survivors.” Shockingly, Miller also called the article “part of a pattern of denialism”—as if the author were on moral par with a Holocaust denier. (Miller didn’t refer to the article by name, but the target of his rhetoric was abundantly clear.) Given all this, it should not be surprising that at least one expert in this kind of site inspection (whose identity is known to Glavin, though not to me) has chosen to publish his comprehensive critique anonymously.
It bears emphasizing that no respectable academic or journalist is denying the fact that thousands of children died while attending Canada’s Residential Schools (the last of which closed in the 1990s). The critiques summarized in the paragraphs above, rather, are limited to the specific claim that the final resting places of hundreds, or even thousands, of dead Indigenous children have been identified over the last 14 months using GPR.
Even the most reputable media outlets sometimes get stories wrong, of course, Quillette included. And for the most part, they will publish corrections and clarifications if a fact-checking critic presents evidence of a journalistic error. In particularly egregious cases, they might even retract an article entirely. But the unmarked-graves story is unusual—perhaps even unique—because the faulty coverage has been a systematic feature across the entire Canadian journalistic landscape since the day the story broke. It isn’t limited to one publication, or even to one type of publication.
This herd-driven aspect of the social panic has yielded a perverse incentive structure among journalists, whereby no single media outlet had any interest in walking back its previously published misinformation, because each could evade criticism simply by pointing to the (equally erroneous) work of everyone else. Why take the gratuitous reputational hit that goes along with admitting one’s own mistakes when all your competitors are staying mum?
That incentive structure explains why the treatment of dissidents such as Glavin has been so harsh: If even a few columnists break ranks, it makes it harder for everyone else (including politicians such as Justin Trudeau, who went all in on the unmarked-graves story from the get go) to evade criticism and accountability. This, I believe, is why institutional players such as Miller and Wente have attempted to smear Rouillard and Glavin, moves that seem aimed at intimidating other journalists into silence. After all, money could be at stake...
All of what I’m discussing here, I realize, will seem very much tied up with Canada’s parochial media scene, which is known to operate in an amateurish, herd-like manner even in the best of times. But when it comes to the unmarked-graves story, the most influential (and, I would argue, irresponsible) media player hasn’t been a Canadian outlet at all, but rather the New York Times. The newspaper’s articles on this subject have been riddled with completely obvious errors since the day after the story first broke. None of these errors have been corrected, despite the passage of over a year since their original publication.
And to be clear: I am not talking here about errors of tone, emphasis, shades of meaning, or omission. I am speaking of flat-out Trump-Won-The-2020-Election-style false information—what some call “fake news.”...
even if any of these dislocations do turn out to indicate the presence of graves, classifying them as “unmarked” may not be straightforward. As has been widely noted, an old grave that bears no markings in 2022 wasn’t necessarily “unmarked” at the time it was used for burial, since rapidly degrading wooden crosses were commonly employed as markers until well into the 20th century.
A further complication is that many of the cemeteries located on or near Residential School properties were used by religiously observant Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities alike...
Ian Austen isn’t a stranger to me. I’ve met him, and we’ve occasionally conversed over social media and email about stories of mutual interest. He’s a skilled and dedicated journalist whose work I’ve read appreciatively for many years. That’s one reason I’m singling him out when there are so many other journalistic offenders I could name: It says a lot about the depth of the social panic surrounding the unmarked-graves story that even a reporter of Austen’s stature was impelled to abandon the high standards he brings to his other work...
it may prove to be Indigenous people themselves who lose the most from this whole sad episode. Given how much terrible treatment was meted out to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities over the course of Canadian history, there is surely no shortage of real evidence of past atrocities waiting to be found by researchers. It seems inevitable that some day in the future, actual bodies will be brought to the surface—genuine, uncontestable evidence of a real historical atrocity that formerly had been unknown or obscure. If, in that authentic moment of discovery, journalists and politicians suddenly find that it’s become impossible to arouse the interest and sympathies of a jaded, untrusting Canadian public, let’s not pretend that we won’t know the reason why."
Liberals will continue to bash Fox News and the Daily Mail for spreading lies, because it's only lies when the right "do" it (usually, just saying something liberals don't like)
