A Narrative Reversal Like No Other - "When I interviewed retired Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Brian Giesbrecht earlier this month for a series of essays on Canada’s Indigenous and substance abuse, he mentioned an article written decades ago by journalist Patrick Donnelly, and commented that “the horror seems to increase the further removed one is to actual attendance. Donnelly reports that he did not have trouble in the 1990s finding actual attendees of IRS, who have positive things to say about the schools. However, the grandchildren and great grandchildren – who never went to the schools, and often have never spoken to relatives who did – use terms like horror, and atrocity of evil.” Could this explain why the drama and controversy, in defiance of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s declared aspirations for reconciliation, appears to increase in rancour as time goes by? To liken this phenomenon to the rise of urban legends is not an idle comparison. Urban myths become more outrageously exaggerated with each successive generation that takes them up. A legitimate process of truth and reconciliation would do the opposite... Judge Giesbrecht commented that, “Donnelly had no trouble finding former students who spoke positively about their experiences. I had the same experience around that time. Then it became all about politics and money, and suddenly everything about residential schools was horrible”. Both Judge Giesbrecht and former tenured professor at Mount Royal University, Frances Widdowson, believe that the transfer of billions of dollars for wrongs long since past and the funding for ground penetrating radar (GPR) searches for rumored clandestine burials will do little to address the problems currently facing Canada’s Indigenous peoples. How did Canada get to this point? What might be considered the “ground zero” event that set the stage for the wildly distorted Indian residential school narrative was Barbara Frum’s 1990 interview on CBC Television with Phil Fontaine in which Fontaine made shocking allegations of widespread sexual abuse at the residential school he attended as a child, abuse which from the context appears to have been student-on-student abuse, although Frum failed to ask the follow-up question which would have elicited that information... There is a growing body of evidence and opinion differing from the a priori assumptions of the Canadian media’s “narrative truth”, but predictably those who wish to suppress and deny the accumulating body of evidence unfriendly to the agenda of the Aboriginal industry show no inclination to engage with this evidence, but instead, in a clever move, have co-opted the term ‘denier’ and have weaponized it against those whose research is poking holes in the official media narrative. Niigaan Sinclair of the University of Manitoba, for example, failed to address any of the evidence in a recent National Post op-ed in which Terry Glavin questioned the veracity of the media’s unmarked graves narrative. Instead, Sinclair took to Twitter where he derided it contemptuously as a “steaming pile of misinformation,” and right on cue, accused Glavin of “denialism.” In a column published in the Winnipeg Free Press on May 31, 2022, Sinclair went further, claiming that denial is a Canadian addiction. Tellingly, however, Sinclair admitted that “The truth is: the full story regarding unmarked graves of residential school children may never be known”. If that is the case, then exactly why is it that Terry Glavin and other columnists and academics are told they are ‘denialists’ when in fact they are digging for evidence and raising questions about a scenario even Niigaan Sinclair admits the full story will never be known? It seems hardcore activists have little to offer beyond profanity when confronted with challenges to the current narrative. Ian Mosby, self-described as a “settler historian of food, health and colonialism in Canada,” responded to a recent New York Post article which also cast doubt on the unmarked graves narrative by angrily tweeting, “F**k you, @nypost.” Activist-journalist Brandi Morin exclaimed, “Wow @nypost Is seriously publishing this BS??!.. They ARE unmarked graves, yes it’s genocide!! This is friggen disgusting that this was published!!” They sound genuinely angry, and no doubt are, but that doesn’t absolve them from the task of explaining why Canadians should believe the sensational clandestine burial claims. Until they do, until we get to the bottom of this unmarked graves fiasco, they should expect a lot more questions."
Educate or prosecute? Two Anishnaabe weigh in on how to deal with residential school deniers - ""It wasn't that bad, they got an education out of it."... Canada's Department of Justice recently confirmed it was considering different legal mechanisms it could deploy to prohibit the practice of denying or minimizing the abuses Indigenous children suffered in residential schools, like it did for the Holocaust in 2022. However, beyond prosecution, advocates stress the importance of educating people to address this issue. Eshkawkogan says he understands how and why residential school denialism happens... "The more educated and understanding everyone will be, the more it'll promote healthy reconciliation and healthier relationships between Canadians and Indigenous people," he said."
Thinking residential schools weren't 100% bad makes you a "denier". The Ministry of Truth has a lot of work ahead, including re-educating former residential school students who have a positive opinion of them! Of course, when grievance mongering worsens relationships, that will just be blamed on the "deniers"
Legislation criminalizing ‘residential school denialism’ unlikely to survive constitutional challenge, legal scholars say - "legal scholars argue that such legislation would be unlikely to survive a constitutionality challenge under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Furthermore, they point out that many of the harms the legislation would strive to prevent may already be covered under the Criminal Code... Hutchison says that while few people in Canada actively try to relitigate the Holocaust, there is far more controversy about residential schools. He says that passing an anti-denialism law would only raise more questions and doubts about the historical record. Baron, whose grandparents are Holocaust survivors, appeared before a government committee examining the law relating to Holocaust denial and urged the government not to adopt it. Her reason for doing so was that bringing charges under the law would open the door to relitigating the Holocaust. She believes that the same rationale applies to residential school denialism. “Using state sanctions and the threat of jail time, or a criminal record, doesn’t tend to effectively curb hateful speech and misinformed opinions,” she says. “It tends to just drive them underground and form up people who think that there’s some type of big conspiracy.” Karen Restoule, vice president at Crestview Strategy and co-founder of BOLD Realities, wonders about the government’s motivations in considering this issue. “It seems like passing legislation—or trying to—and then having it struck down is the current government’s modus operandi,” she says. “It’s almost as though they don’t intend for these laws to withstand the stress tests, and that the process itself serves as a communications strategy and a tactic for conveying its position and ideology on a specific issue in a manner that’s ‘seriously’ intended.”"
Meme - Sean Carleton: "If there are settler Canadians out there just learning about the Cowessess announcement this morning (re: the locating of 751+ bodies in an unmarked mass grave at the Marieval residential school) and want to learn more, as an historian of the system I am happy to share resources."
Sean Carleton: "I've not said there are mass graves. Quite the opposite; we agree. BUT ALSO those exaggerating the existence of a "mass grave hoax" need to be held to account. They assert their claim of a hoax - a serious allegation - with little evidence, which fuels denialism and hate."
Duncan Campbell Scott | The Canadian Encyclopedia - "In exchange for signing Treaty 9, the Indigenous peoples were promised reserves, money, education (later provided by residential schools) and rights to hunt and fish"
Residential Church School Scandal | The Canadian Encyclopedia - "in the 1940s and 1950s, during parliamentary hearings on revising the Indian Act, a slim majority of Indian bands, as well as regional and national native organizations, said they were in favour not only of residential schools but also of keeping the religious component. In the 1960s, when the churches and federal government wanted to close certain schools, some Indian bands pleaded to have them remain open. "There were a variety of reasons why communities desired the retention of the residential facilities," says J. R. Miller, a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan and the author of Shingwauk's Vision, a well-respected 1996 book about native residential schools... In communities where there was a lot of family breakdown, residential schools provided a much-needed social service. They were also a source of native employment. In a 1962 letter, Ruth Gorman, the lawyer representing then-Chief George Labelle and the councillors of Alberta's Stoney band implored the United Church to stop the government from closing the area school. "It will be a great tragedy if this famous United Church mission school is closed. The Indians are only asking for a halfway chance to educate their children." The school survived for seven more years. Today, hundreds of members of the Stoney band and other local bands are suing the federal government; ironically, one is Madeline Labelle, the niece of the former chief who once fought to keep the school open... He knew the government was only settling sexual abuse claims and he had none that would stand up in court. Undeterred, McKiggan, who confers monthly with residential-school lawyers across the country, says he came up with a solution: "I said, 'Let's not just go after sexual abuse, let's start a suit on behalf of everyone who ever attended the school because even kids who never had a hand laid on them came out with horrible emotional scars.' " That kind of blanket condemnation enrages a sizable minority of former students, some of whom still practise the faith of the institution they attended or regularly keep in touch with instructors. Some go so far as to say that despite some terrible times with a sadistic teacher, they were better off at residence. Irene Hoff is an 81-year-old member of the Odanak reserve outside Montreal. In 1930, at the age of 10, she was sent to the Chapleau Anglican Indian Residential School in Northern Ontario where she lived for seven years. One of 10 children from an impoverished family, she went, Hoff says, "with my mother's blessing - she wanted me to get an education." She recalls that, contrary to popular belief, no government or church official forced her mother to send her children to school. Hoff, who worked as an administrative assistant in Indian Affairs after her schooling, says the only abuse she saw was from older girls brutally bullying younger ones. Residential-school litigation, she says, is all about money. "It's a sore point with me, all this bad-mouthing of the schools," Hoff adds. "If a lawyer came to my door, I wouldn't let him in."... not all former residential-school students have been quick to jump on the bandwagon. Last year, in response to entreaties by Merchant, one Saskatchewan native blasted back. "I will not tell you again, leave me the f-- alone," came the reply neatly typed on the Merchant solicitation. "In the residential school, I learned how to fend for myself. I also learned how to work so I do not need any of your little settlement dollars. I will not tell you again to leave me alone. Next time, I will sue you for harassing me." In the legal chaos now surrounding residential schools, that would be the ultimate irony: the lawyers themselves being sued."
Complicity in their own genocide - such is the tragedy of residential schools!
Is Indigenous knowledge infallible? Yes, says Marc Miller - "THE MAIN Indigenous oral accounts about these and other issues in the six TRC volumes are the anecdotal testimonies of those former students — always called “Survivors,” a term invariably capitalized and applied to all former students regardless of their experiences, a word that subliminally and perversely compares these students to Nazi Holocaust survivors — who chose to come forward to tell their unexamined and unconfirmed stories with no regard to whether they constituted a representative or random selection of living former students. Despite a $72 million budget that could have easily allowed drawing a statistically significant sample, the TRC heard from a mainly aggrieved self-selected cohort of some 6,500 of the estimated 80,000 former students still alive when the hearings were held. Equally important, many of these — a skewed sample of 4% of the estimated 150,000 students who ever attended an IRS who were even allowed to hear and perhaps learn from each other’s testimonies — presented their “knowings” in private. None were subjected to cross-examination or verification, including those making allegations of heinous crimes like pedophilic sexual assault and murder that the TRC should have immediately reported to the police. By hyper-privileging their unverified testimonies, Mr. Miller dehumanizes these 6,500 former students by implying that unlike all other people on Earth, indigenous Canadians never prevaricate, exaggerate or accept money for testifying at formal hearings... How can that be? Not a single known victim, not a single identified murderer, not a single grieving parent looking for a child who went missing while attending a residential school, and not a single body. But to even ask questions like these is now considered genocide denial or, as Mr. Miller somewhat more delicately claims, is “Obfuscating or denying history.” Alas, such is the nature of the pre-Enlightenment Aboriginal “knowings” that Mr. Miller wants us to accept as infallible, in the process ignoring the elementary fact that without truth, there can never be reconciliation."
Excavation after 14 anomalies detected at former residential school site found no evidence of graves: Manitoba chief - "Chief Derek Nepinak of Minegoziibe Anishinabe shared the results of the four-week excavation... Fourteen anomalies were detected using ground-penetrating radar in the basement of the church on the site of the former Pine Creek Residential School last year. Survivors had spoken about “horror stories” in the basement."
Damn genocide denier! He needs to be jailed!
Excavation after 14 anomalies detected at former residential school site found no evidence of graves: Manitoba chief : canada - "I stumbled across some info that the Kamloops site has had at lest 3 archaeological digs and they have not found any bodies yet"
No human remains found 2 years after claims of 'mass graves' in Canada - "“I don’t like to use the word hoax because it’s too strong but there are also too many falsehoods circulating about this issue with no evidence,” Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post... until last week, there hadn’t been any excavations in the alleged burial spots. There still have been no excavations at Kamloops nor any dates set for any such work to commence. That didn’t stop many in Canada from painting a demonic picture of the residential schools and those who staffed them... Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief RoseAnne Archibald told the BBC in August 2021 that the residential school policy was “designed to kill, and we’re seeing proof of that …”... SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images A number of writers, academics and politicians like Rouillard have come out cautioning against the claim that hundreds or thousands of children are buried at the school, but they have been labeled “genocide deniers” — even though many of the skeptics do not dispute that conditions at the schools were often harsh. “The evidence does not support the overall gruesome narrative put forward around the world for several years, a narrative for which verifiable evidence has been scarce, or non-existent,” James C. McCrae, a former attorney general for Manitoba, wrote in an essay published last year. McCrae resigned from his position on a government panel in May after his views on residential schools outraged Indigenous groups and other activists and politicians. Tom Flanagan, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, told The Post Wednesday that he sees the issue as a “moral panic” similar to the hysteria over repressed memories and alleged Satanic cults in schools in the US in the 1980s and ’90s. “People believe things that are not true or improbable and they continue to believe it even when no evidence turns up,” Flanagan said. “People seem to double down on their conviction that something happened.” Eldon Yellowhorn, a professor and founding chair of the Indigenous studies department at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, told The Post last year that he too was cautious about the veracity of some of the more highly charged claims. Yellowhorn, a member of the Blackfoot Nation, had been hired by Canada’s powerful Truth and Reconciliation Commission to search for and identify gravesites of Indigenous children at the residential schools. But he said then that many of the graves he found were from actual cemeteries and it wasn’t clear how they died."
Anthropologist explains how she concluded 200 children were buried at the Kamloops Residential School - The Globe and Mail - "Racelle Kooy, a spokesperson for the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, said a full copy of Dr. Beaulieu’s report would not be released to the public and media... newly elected Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald characterized the findings in Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc not as discoveries, but recoveries."
I wonder why the report cannot be released
Local indigenous leaders might not have called them graves, but other indigenous leaders did
Manitoba’s new Indigenous Affairs Minister facing criticism after remarks defending residential schools - The Globe and Mail - "Premier Brian Pallister on Thursday named Alan Lagimodiere, who is Métis, as the Minister for Indigenous Reconciliation and Northern Relations. The appointment followed revelations Wednesday of a surprise resignation by Mr. Lagimodiere’s predecessor. That departure, which happened July 9 but was not revealed by the province, came after Mr. Pallister said European settlers came to what is now Canada to build communities, rather than destroy things. Mr. Lagimodiere said Thursday that as an Indigenous man, he heard stories about residential schools his entire life. He said he thinks the people responsible for the institutions believed they were “doing the right thing” at the time. Asked whether those responsible were trying to destroy Indigenous lives, communities, culture and language – even if they believed it was the right thing to do – the minister stood firm. “The residential-school system was designed to take Indigenous children and give them the skills and abilities they would need to fit into society as it moved forward,” Mr. Lagimodiere told reporters at the news conference in the legislature."
Meme - Seamus O'Regan Jr @SeamusOR...: "Guys like Pierre Poilievre talk a good game about freedom. But not all kids are free to be themselves at home. Not all parents are accepting. Not all homes are safe. Schools can be. Schools should be."
"Poilievre tells Trudeau to 'butt out' on New Brunswick's policy on LGBTQ students"
Melissa Mbarki: "Like residential schools when the government knew what was best for Indigenous children?"
The False Narrative of Residential School Burials - "a number of articles and videos have suggested that these claims are a massive fraud or giant hoax. The truth is even more disturbing. They are not simply a fraud or hoax. Many of the people accusing residentials schools, and Catholic clergy in particular, of murdering thousands of indigenous children in horrible ways and secretly disposing of their bodies — with the help of six-year-old conscripts — actually believe their bizarre claims. What is going on? RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS took centre stage after Barbara Frum’s 1990 CBC television interview with Phil Fontaine in which Fontaine, then Manitoba Regional Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, unexpectedly made allegations of widespread sexual abuse at the residential school he had attended as a child... Since that interview, preposterous stories have taken hold and become deeply-rooted in First Nations communities — stories of murders and clandestine burials on a large scale, of babies thrown into furnaces, of children imprisoned in underground chambers and cisterns, hanged in barns, and shocked in electric chairs, with the result that $321 million dollars of federal government funding has been committed to searching for unmarked graves all over the country, and helping surivors heal from their trauma. There is no documentary evidence to support these stories. There is no record, for example, 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,” as claimed by Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Marie Wilson. This has not stopped indigenous leaders from proclaiming these conspiracy theories as fact, nor has it stopped the media and general public from believing them. In 2021 there were vigils across the country for the 215 children supposedly buried in secret by Catholic priests and brothers in the apple orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, despite the fact that the RCMP and the BC Coroner declined to investigate, suggesting they did not give credence to the claims. To make matters worse, the original story of 215 burials in the apple orchard at Kamloops was amplified in a recent CBC Fifth Estate program, The Reckoning: Secrets Unearthed by Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc, to include stories of sexual abuse, children who mysteriously disappeared, the lifeless bodies of four boys hanging in a barn, abortions, and babies thrown into the school furnace... Although not a single police report, newspaper account, or any other historical record supports these allegations of murder and secret burials, distinguished indigenous leaders, including TRC Commissioners Murray Sinclair, Wilton Littlechild, and Marie Wilson, as well as former Kamloops chief Manny Jules and Dr. Ron Ignace, appear to believe tales of six-year-olds secretly burying bodies late at night... IT IS WORTH noting that prior to the interview with Phil Fontaine in 1990, one would have had to look very hard to find anything even resembling these claims. It was only after the Fontaine interview that stories of residential school atrocities gained ground, even though they were contradicted by the explicit evidence of some contemporary indigenous leaders. Former Dene Chief Cece Hodgson-McCauley, whose weekly newspaper column, Northern Notes, ran for thirty years, was the most outspoken. In a column in 2018, she wrote: “We all heard of horrible lies created by some individuals in order to receive as much money as they could.” In her final column she said, “I always tell you the truth.”... Not one of the many distinguished indigenous individuals who spent their formative years at a residential school said anything publicly about students who disappeared, or were murdered, or hung in a barn, or thrown into furnaces, nor did they report such allegations to the RCMP. So where did all of these stories about residential school atrocities come from? IT SEEMS THE concern about residential schools generated by the Fontaine interview was manipulated and spurred forward by the conspiracy theories of Kevin Annett, a defrocked United Church minister and self-styled “gut-level anarchist” with an ambition to “change the world fundamentally” and “make a revolution.”... Oddly, Two Row Times brushed off the fact that allegations of secret burials by former students had been definitively disproved with the offhand comment that “thankfully” no human remains were found. Despite these setbacks, the Mohawk Nation continues to believe stories about secretly buried children, and plans further searches for which ample funding is available; the Ontario provincial government has allocated a total of $20 million to finance searches for unmarked graves at residential schools throughout the province... anti-Christian sentiment has been largely directed against the Catholic Church and the Catholic religious orders which operated and staffed many residential schools. Although Catholic-run institutions comprised only 43% of all Indian residential schools in Canada, Catholic residential schools occupy most of the media coverage of these alleged atrocities... Sometimes these claims involving alleged Catholic perpetrators defy the known facts of the case... the federal government has given First Nations communities $321 million dollars to search for “missing children” who simply aren’t there. But government spending has spiralled even more seriously out of control. The federal government recently announced that $40 billion dollars will be spent on the indigenous child welfare issue. As Professor Tom Flanagan explains, that profligate spending was only possible given the current frenzy surrounding “unmarked graves.”... Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller’s recent announcement that he believes all of these claims without reservation — no matter how preposterous — is truly alarming. More alarming still is his denunciation of anyone who questions the claims. He has even hinted at making such questioning illegal hate speech... Whatever the current government does or does not do, the strong belief within the indigenous community that Canada has acted murderously towards them in the past and is continuing to commit genocide against them and their culture in the present will poison relations for years to come, and make it very unlikely that indigenous young people will have happy and successful lives... It thus appears that stories told by former students of their experiences at residential schools are not “knowings” or the “oral histories of Knowledge Keepers,” as Chief Casimir would have it. They are merely stories told by human beings whose memories, like the memories of all other human beings, are fallible and frail. What is needed is concrete evidence that the burials at Kamloops and Williams Lake actually do exist, something which can only be accomplished through excavation."
If you question liberal moral panics and conspiracy theories, you're a Nazi
In Kamloops, Not One Body Has Been Found - "From an allegation of “cultural genocide” endorsed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) we have moved to “physical genocide,” a conclusion that the Commission explicitly rejects in its report. And all of this is based only on soil abnormalities that could easily be caused by root movements, as the anthropologist herself cautioned in the July 15 press conference. According to another anthropologist, Scott Hamilton, who has worked on residential school cemeteries for the TRC between 2013-2015, one must be very careful with the use of ground-penetrating radar because the soil may have been disturbed over the years by "sedimentary texture, ... culturally-derived unconformities, obstructions or voids."... In its 2015 report, the TRC identified 3,200 deaths of children at residential schools. Surprisingly, it was unable to record the names of one-third of the children (32%) or for half (49%), the cause of death... The Commission included all these unnamed students in the total of student deaths. That means that student deaths could have been counted twice: both in the trimester report by the principals and in the general compilation with no names. The Commission admitted that this possibility exists that some of the deaths recorded in the Named Register might also be included in the Unnamed Register... It is likely that this methodological gap relates to the years prior to 1950 because the death rate recorded by the Commission in residential schools from 1921 to 1950 (named and unnamed deaths) is twice as high as that of Canadian youth in the general population aged five to fourteen for the same years. This mortality rate averaged about four deaths per year for every 1,000 youth attending the schools. Their deaths were mostly due to tuberculosis and influenza when the Commission could identify the cause. On the other hand, the mortality rate in residential schools was actually comparable to the Canadian average from 1950 to 1965, again for youth aged five to fourteen... With the cemetery so close by, is it really credible that the remains of 200 children were buried clandestinely in a mass grave, on the reserve itself, without any reaction from the band council until last summer? Chief Casimir states that the presence of children’s remains had been “known” in the community for a long time. Aboriginal families are certainly as concerned about the fate of their children as any other community; why did they say nothing? Moreover, how can one think that entire groups of religious men and women dedicated to high moral standards could conspire to commit such sordid crimes without dissent and not even a single whistleblower?... The school is also close to the City of Kamloops. Agents of the Department of Indian Affairs, closely monitoring school operations, would have responded quickly to news of any missing or deceased children – if there had been any. Finally, as we have seen, the province required the completion of a death certificate for all deceased persons. At the turn of the twentieth century, British Columbia was not the wild west. A researcher today wishing to obtain the death certificate of any child attending the Kamloops residential school, can get it by entering the name and date of death on the the British Columbia Genealogical Records website. This type of research is also possible in other provinces."
Ottawa's Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway renamed Kichi Zībī Mīkan - "The National Capital Commission (NCC) board of directors voted Thursday to rename the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway as Kichi Zībī Mīkan. The Ottawa River Parkway was renamed in 2012 after Canada's first prime minister, who oversaw the centralization and expansion of the country's residential school system."
