Niigaan Sinclair (Credit: Penguin Random House Canada).

It must be hell for an itinerant activist like Niigaan Sinclair to be sandwiched between two epic genocides. On one side is the genocide of Indian Residential Schools and on the other is the “ongoing genocide” of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). The former would have been history’s longest running genocide but in a recent column, Sinclair informs us that “the centuries-old, systemic genocide of MMIWG and LGBTTQ+ peoples” continues.

Readers will, of course, note that the MMIW acronym has been extended to include a slurry of sexual orientations. Sinclair cheats us of the fuller acronym recently proffered by MP Leah Gazan (NDP; Winnipeg Centre) in a viral clip of earnest kvetching. It’s not at all clear how Canada actually targets transgender people for genocide or why it would need to if people undergo surgeries that eliminate their ability to reproduce.

Sinclair moans: “Even as a prime minister (Justin Trudeau) recognized a genocide was occurring, though, very little changed other than the level of funding flowing of some organizations and short-term initiatives.”

The obvious reason for that lack of change is because no one takes the claim of MMIW genocide seriously and it’s hard to tell if Sinclair and Gazan do, either. How could they, short of blind, ideological adherence? The claim is patently absurd and false and Sinclair inadvertently explains why.

“Data from Statistic Canada shows the homicide rate for Indigenous women and girls is more than six times higher than the rate for non-Indigenous women.”

The rhetorical objective of MMIW activists has been to construe all homicides of aboriginal women as a genocide regardless of the apparent lack of system and the demonstrable intent required to prove genocide has been committed. As well, most of the MMIW murders have been solved and criminal convictions obtained. To further prosecute parties for these unrelated homicides as a genocide, it would be necessary to show how how all of these unconnected killers acted under direction from a state authority.

However, Sinclair and the rest of the MMIW activists have no intention of treating their dubious case of genocide as a criminal matter. For all intents and purposes, they regard the accusation as the verdict and expect sentencing in the form of duly indexed government funding for organizations like the “National Family and Survivors Circle (and) the Native Women’s Association of Canada, Les Femmes Michif Otipemisiwak, (and) Giganawenimaanaanig.”

As with all homicides everywhere, the MMIW victims tended to have known their killers and often as a domestic partner. The killers were overwhelmingly also aboriginal. A genocide that has the target group being most responsible for killing the target group is a morally repugnant absurdity.

To the extent that characterizing the MMIW homicides as a genocide isn’t just a venal ploy to get paid for an especially specious form of special interests advocacy, there is an underlying ideological objective that is commonly shared amongst most aboriginal activists: Indigenous sovereignty. Defining Indigenous sovereignty is much like defining reconciliation: it is more of a sentiment generating heat by friction rather than a clear, intelligible concept. Indigenous sovereignty tends to be defined more by what it is not since it is something that never really existed in any meaningful sense.

What Indigenous sovereignty is not is Canadian. A people require a state to be sovereign and for aboriginal nationalists, a state of their own is lacking. But what they can do is delegitimize the existing Canadian state and one of the oldest strategies for doing so is by depicting Canada as a genocidal enterprise.

When Sinclair talks about a centuries-old systemic genocide, he is delegitimizing the entirety of Canada’s existence and then some. If Canada has always been committing this genocide and it is still occurring, does Sinclair actually expect the Canadian government to stop?

Since it is common knowledge that real people were actually convicted for most of these murders, funding organizations who want to call it a genocide is an obvious waste of money. Those organizations aren’t stopping any future MMIW homicides by pretending there is a genocide. But that’s the moral degeneracy of their pretension: a rhetorical genocide is a genocide they figure they can live with if they have generous government funding for denouncing the ongoing genocide. As well, by regarding the MMIW homicides as a genocide ostensibly caused by colonizers, advocates like Sinclair make victims out of the aboriginal victimizers.

A very real social phenomenon is being observed, as Sinclair writes: “Nearly one-fifth (17 per cent) of Indigenous women have experienced at least one form of intimate partner violence. For Indigenous women who identify as LGBTTQ+, the number is a shocking 86 per cent. More than four in 10 (43 per cent) of Indigenous women have been sexually assaulted at least once since the age of 15.”

Maybe there is some need amongst the MMIW activists to psychologically distance themselves from the prolific rates of aboriginal violence by blaming it on the colonial state but there is a profound question of justiciability to declare that there is an ongoing genocide.

The alleged MMIW genocide is potentially actionable under the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court could theoretically impose its jurisdiction if Canada was either unwilling or unable to prosecute its accused citizens. If this was at all an actual genocide, Carney would be compelled under the Rome Statue to seek prosecution for the perpetrators or be held liable under that same Statute. However, because the accusation of genocide has become common rhetorical ordnance, there is no expectation of actually seeking prosecution for this alleged genocide. Consequently, we ended up with the absurdity of a sitting Prime Minister agreeing that he was presiding over an ongoing genocide and facing no prosecution for it.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confessing to a MMIW genocide (Credits: Johnathan Hayward; CP).

“Does Canada under Trudeau’s successor continue to acknowledge the existence of the genocide of Indigenous women and girls and LGBTTQ+ people?,” asks Sinclair. If there is an ongoing genocide, it’s a crime whether or not Mark Carney acknowledges it: he is now implicated as the current Prime Minister. But this is all just so much posturing and vanity on Sinclair’s part, he doesn’t see the MMIW ‘genocide’ as a crime requiring investigation and prosecution.

Having reduced ‘genocide’ to a rhetorical banality and evidently failing to reckon with his handiwork, Sinclair laments the absence of the funding that obviously should be sent to address the alleged genocide.

“Is seven years of piecemeal funding that barely scratched the surface of the problem adequate?”

The answer would be, ‘no,’ according to the Department of Justice Canada from a 2024 summary report: “The rate of homicide for Indigenous women (4.60 victims per 100,000 Indigenous women in 2021, 5.26 victims in 2022, and 4.74 victims in 2023), and for Indigenous men (15.13 victims per 100,000 Indigenous men in 2021, 17.27 victims in 2022, and 13.85 victims in 2023) have fluctuated year to year, with men consistently having a higher rate.”

The colonial state does seem to be doing a good job, though, of perpetuating the MMIW genocide: “In 2023, the rate of Indigenous men accused of homicide (15.22 per 100,000 Indigenous men) was almost nine times higher than that of non-Indigenous men (1.80 per 100,000 non-Indigenous men). Further, the rate of Indigenous women accused (4.17 per 100,000 Indigenous women) was just over 26 times higher than the rate of non-Indigenous women accused (0.16 per 100,000 non-Indigenous women).”

If you blame the night for sun burns, expect more sun burns.

In yet another webinar dedicated to combatting the shibboleth of residential school denialism, Dr. Sean Carleton, Carey Newman, Paul Barnsley, and Peggy Janicki tried to convince themselves that they are on the right side of history regarding the claim of missing children in unmarked burials associated with former Indian Residential Schools (IRS).

“The reason that we are seeing all these attacks is because we are winning,” crowed Carleton while also noting that denialism is increasing across Canada. To be sure, what Carleton et al try to pejorate as denialism is simply rational and healthy critical thinking.

Nearly five years after the shocking news that the discovery of 215 children’s remains had been confirmed at the former Kamloops IRS, the public can see that there is no evidence of any such thing. Rather, what we are seeing is a restated refusal by the perpetrators of the sensational claim to do anything that might expose the claim as false, especially excavation.

The absence of evidence after the claimed confirmation has been a disquieting truth for Carleton and company. They rightly fear the undoing of the Reconciliation zeitgeist because of growing public resentment over the social havoc wreaked by the 215 claim. After over 120 churches were torched, the public expects a moral reckoning that includes a resolution to the question of whether or not there are any missing children buried in an old orchard in Kamloops.

St. Jean Baptiste Parish in Morinville, Alberta, (Diane Burrel/via REUTERS).

The panelists conspicuously avoided referring specifically to the claim that 215 children’s remains were found but that claim is central to the social phenomenon they stigmatize as residential school denialism. While one of the “possible learning objectives” of the discussion was to “examine practical, experience-informed approaches used by panelists to interrupt, displace, and respond to Residential School Denialism,” the panelists professed to ignoring, dismissing and gaslighting anyone that might ask an inconvenient question.

Referring to a recent University of Victoria event where Frances Widdowson appeared, Newman, who serves as the University’s Impact Chair in Indigenous Art Practices, boasted: “The truth that we know is unassailable. Instead of engaging with them and confronting them, we organized ourselves in a circle where we protected the ‘Survivors’ flag we’ve raised on campus.”

Protected the flag from what?

Newman, best known for his artwork, The Witness Blanket, had an open microphone set up at this event and a young woman “started to ask a couple of questions that weren’t quite, um, they didn’t, she didn’t quite get to the point of denialism but she was sort of laying the ground work first, um, talking about freedom of speech and critical thought and all of those things. And we realized that this is not a person that any of us knew and so one of my colleagues and, uh, her student came over and just sort of guided the person away from the microphone.”

An unassailable truth doesn’t need muscle to defend itself but as Newman explained, Indigenous people (he claims that identity) have cultural practices of witnessing: “You listen to what people say, you think about them and then you speak: you speak back what you just heard. And this is a really important part of upholding truth.”

That, of course, isn’t what most of us understand as witnessing: the accuser doesn’t get to tell the witness what they must have seen.

Caught in a zugzwang where there is no evidence to be found of missing and murdered children at former residential schools, Carleton and his fellow travelers can only resort to gaslighting, intimidation and rhetorical chicanery. As their attempts to preserve a false narrative become increasingly absurd, so does the unintended irony.

The Gravers’ insistence on shielding the 215 claim from scrutiny has resulted in an epistemic crisis that can be seen in a quote read by Carleton: “Reconciliation is the process of accepting what happened and growing from it.”

What exactly happened, though, and how do they know that it happened? Mass murder is claimed to have happened including the tossing of babies into incinerators. Barnsley, a Producer for APTN Investigative News, argued that IRS ‘Survivors’ should be believed like we generally believe women who claim to have been sexually abused. “I believe these people without any hesitation whatsoever,” confided Barnsley.

Barnsley then quipped, “These residential schools became theme parks for pedophiles because word got out that nobody was overseeing it. The indigenous kids were not seen as worthy of protection as the white kids.” Word got out how? Barnsley is casting aspersions that he can’t substantiate and he seems to be forgetting how many aboriginal people worked in these schools.

Evidently exasperated by demands for proof, Newman moaned, “We get distracted by phrases like, ‘Where are the bodies?’ We don’t need the bodies to know about the terrible things that happened.” If you want to suggest that there are hundreds or even thousands of homicides at the schools, you do need to have some bodies or even some names for who these victims were. Just because A, B and C happened, that doesn’t mean that D also happened, and D is genocidal killing in this case.

The webinar really starts going off the rails at that point. Barnsley seems to realize that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof but he clearly believes that somewhere in Canada there is documentary evidence, if not forensic evidence, to be found of these extraordinary claims. With no sense of the irony, Barnsley remarked: “Whenever we hear an absolutely shocking story from an Elder and we go to try and independently verify it, I think it is safe to say, the more shocking it is, the harder it is to find evidence of it. And we know the government has it.”

It doesn’t occur to Barnsley that any such documents simply may not exist because the events never happened. Shadowing the recent release of a totally blacked-out report on what Tk’emlups te Secwepemc did with the money they got for excavations they never undertook, Barnsley griped, “If (the document) does come out, it’s so heavily redacted, it’s useless.”

Survivor flag; University of Victoria, B.C.

In a welcome departure from the previous routine of never mentioning any denialist by name, the panelists frequently referred to Frances Widdowson, who has become a central figure in disputing the 215 claim. Barnsley scoffs at Widdowson for her use of Kevin Annett’s fictions as an example and explanation of where all these wild stories of murder and other infamies originate. Incredibly, Barnsley sees the debunking of Annett as the debunking of Widdowson.

Barnsley relates how Annett “started going around saying there was a gigantic number who died and had been disposed of in these schools.” Annett claimed there were 50,000 missing and murdered students; a third of all who ever attended IRS (the late Murray Sinclair at least had the decency to pare the tally down to a more modest 15-25,000). “Annett,” said Barnsley, “would show up at places and wave a bone around and say it was of a child that was excavated outside of a residential school.” That bone was later proven to be animal. Despite this being a nearly identical scenario to the story of a human rib bone being allegedly found at the infamous Kamloops orchard (the bone has since disappeared, evidently under Tk’emlups’ watch), the panelists avoided mentioning the parallel.

“So evidence is tricky here,” Barnsley laconically related. To work around that tricky evidence, Barnsley referred to the Delgamuukw decision which established that “oral history is as reliable as documentary history.” Barnsley states that there are Indigenous cultural traditions that strictly govern oral history but we have to take his word for it because that is not a falsifiable claim. Therefore, Barnsley concludes, the ‘absolutely shocking’ claims of Survivors should be believed, because like women relating “tales of abuse about powerful men,” at some point you just have to “believe the victim.”

The problem is that wanting to believe the victim can lead to confirmation bias and the absence of evidence can then be rationalized as a conspiracy to conceal the evidence.

From Ian Humber, Registrar under Ontario Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act.

“I wish I could say it’s easy to find absolutely clear cut evidence,” Barnsley confided, “but that’s not always the case. In some cases it’s because the colonial governments weren’t interested in preserving evidence of some of the things they did, you know, 100 years, 150 years, even 20 years ago.”

Barnsley related APTN’s frustrated attempts to confirm the use of an electric chair at St. Anne’s IRS to punish students. The notorious electric chair was only some prank contraption put together by staff and students but Barnsley exemplifies just how fervent some wits are in their conviction that every imaginable evil occurred at residential schools. The lurid tales of priests throwing newborn infants into school incinerators is another example where apocryphal tales of past horrors are fabricated, even from whole cloth, to serve contemporary narratives of victimhood. Absolute victimhood breeds absolute entitlement.

While blind reverence for IRS Survivors may have Barnsley believing things that he can’t prove to be true and disbelieving the possibility that Survivors could be wrong, Carleton represents another kettle of fish. Carleton does understand the Gravers’ conundrum but rather than admit that there is no evidence of any murdered students in unmarked burials, he deliberately obfuscates those alleged criminal deaths with the deaths known to have occurred at the schools. Overwhelmingly killed by infectious disease, students were lawfully buried at cemeteries, sometimes situated on schools. These graves have often since become unmarked.

Mark Mackisoc of the Residential School Death Investigation Team; Office of the Chief Coroner Ontario.

Carleton mentioned an investigation that uncovered more deaths connected to an IRS than had been previously known. Working for the Residential School Death Investigation Team of the Ontario Office of the Chief Coroner, former OPP constable Mark Mackisoc and his team recently announced that a further 21 student deaths connected to McIntosh Residential School were added to the 44 deaths recorded by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. Because these are deaths “connected” to residential schools, it should be kept in mind that these may be deaths considered to be associated with the schools in a similar fashion to the way the NCTR has included in its commemorative tally student deaths that occurred within one year of school attendance and at other locations from causes unrelated to the schools. As reported in MSN news, “investigations have expanded beyond schools into psychiatric hospitals, Indian hospitals and sanatoria, reflecting how Indigenous children and survivors were frequently moved between institutions.”

The Office of the Chief Coroner was reached for clarification but has not responded by the time of publishing.

McIntosh Residential School (Credits: NCTR; date unknown).

Mackisoc noted that: “Infectious disease was the leading cause of death, reflecting outbreaks such as influenza and tuberculosis that were common during certain periods.” After disease, drowning was the most common cause. Apparently, no deaths by foul play were reported to have been discovered in this investigation. Carleton intentionally blurs the distinction between the foul play that is implied by the alleged unmarked burials and what is known of unmarked graves. Omitting the significant distinctions of both cause and manner of burial, Carleton thereby presents these newly discovered deaths by natural cause as nefarious. Deceiving oneself is one thing, deceiving others is another and that is what makes Carleton the quisling of academia.

Returning to the task of coping with an absence of evidence, Carleton argued that “there are multiple ways of truth telling” such as oral history. Newman used the Delgamkuuw decision to justify treating Survivors’ stories as truth. But we aren’t talking about traditional usage of a piece of land, we’re talking about accusing people who are still alive of capital crimes for which there is no statute of limitation, a number of whom are actually Indigenous and former students themselves.

Asked to advise youth on how they should deal with friends and family who express denialist thoughts, Newman slipped. “One of the things that I try to do when I’m in a situation like that is, rather than having the conversation on their terms where you’re saying, ‘No, that’s not true. You’re not a liar, or what you’re saying is, uh, untrue,’ is to try to talk about, to, to ask a different question. ‘What about this’? And if that’s factually based, then that can be a way to open a conversation, um, to discuss it.”

What if it is a question that isn’t factually based like, ‘Are there missing and murdered children secretly buried in an old orchard at a former residential school?’ In that case, then, is there any need for a conversation or discussion? Newman has unintentionally admitted that believing the Survivors matters more than knowing if what they say is true.

For all the bad dreams that Widdowson gives Carleton et al, they have consistently refused to cite any statement that she has made. Disparaging the speaker is not disproving their argument. It completely escapes these advocates that it is their own fallacies that are prompting more and more of the public to doubt the lurid tales of residential school atrocities.

“A big part of why we’re dealing with this (denialism) is because we’re winning. We’ve made significant progress,” Newman rallied in his echo chamber. He’s not the first person to be reduced to living in a bunker and thinking the war was still winnable.

In a recent and rather laconic column, Niigaan Sinclair reflected on the state of Reconciliation across Canada: “For the first time in Canadian history, we’re making an effort to work together meaningfully — in places such as hospitals, businesses, law firms, offices and schools.”

Is this the first time in Canadian history that such dialogue has happened? No, and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People would be one example where a comprehensive rapprochement was attempted. There is also a Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous People that has been in existence since 1990 with former residential school student, Len Marchand, serving as its first Chair.

Why does Sinclair insist on making Reconciliation sound like it is sui generis?

It may be because of what Reconciliation means to him professionally. “Between teaching classes and writing in this space, I’ve been on the road for weeks, speaking, listening and learning,” relates Sinclair. After all, “It’s conference season.”

Sinclair frames his efforts in terms of discourse but that is disingenuous.

“The reality for most people in this country is that our parents and grandparents never interacted or learned about one another. Worse, many were indoctrinated into seeing each other as impossibly different.”

While there is definitely a discussion worth having about how Canada’s default Indian policy of segregation has affected our mutual socialization, is it true that many of us were indoctrinated to see each other as “impossibly different?”

In 1969, the Trudeau government tried to make the case that, in human reality, there is no difference between us. The White Paper argued that the legal distinction of being Indian, the segregation of the reserve system, and the treatment of aboriginal people as “a race apart” were a serious social problem for Canada that should not be allowed to continue. If human equality was a guiding value for the Canadian polity, the separateness of being Indian wholly contradicted that value.

However, the White Paper’s egalitarian aspirations were snuffed out by aboriginal activists of the day. Rather than rectifying Canada to a plane of civil equality, a heightened emphasis on aboriginal exceptionalism became de rigeur. The new formulation was ‘Citizens Plus.’

L-R: Alberta Premier Harry Strom, activist Harold Cardinal and Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chretien. C. 1970.

The concept of Citizens Plus originates with the Hawthorn Report (1967): “Indians should be regarded as ‘citizens plus’; in addition to the normal rights and duties of citizenship, Indians possess certain additional rights as charter members of the Canadian community.”

The contradiction with civil equality was obvious but proponents justified permitting the difference in rights on the grounds of indigenous exceptionalism. In his Red Paper, Harold Cardinal more fulsomely articulated the concept of Citizens Plus. He argued that in order to preserve indigenous cultures, it was imperative to continue the policies of Indian status and expand upon them by establishing exclusive rights. This has been the general drift of Indian policy ever since underscored by an absolute antipathy to assimilation.

The tragic irony is that Cardinal warned that the ideas of the White Paper would lead to a future generation being “condemned to the despair and ugly spectre of urban poverty in ghettos.” It was, in fact, the retention of Canada’s soft segregation that resulted in that ugly spectre of urban poverty and its doppelganger in the many wilderness ghettos of the reserve system. Living apart from mainstream society means living apart from mainstream social norms. Aboriginal people now appear at the top of nearly every index of social pathology and have for many years.

The problem for a contemporary rhetorician like Sinclair is trying to account for the conspicuous disparity in social outcomes between “Indigenous peoples and Canadians” while also trying to preserve Indigenous exceptionalism and say something coherent about Reconciliation. Being Indigenous is impossibly different from just being Canadian because it is, fundamentally, a racial distinction.

Sinclair goes so far as to recognize that: “Attitudes, perspectives and beliefs have always created laws, systems and institutions that treat people different (sic) in this country.” But is that actually a problem in his eyes? It doesn’t seem to be: “Talking about them isn’t a condemnation, it’s a call to action.”

“One of the most difficult things I witness,” writes Sinclair, “Is in discussions that uncover how power and privilege is always (sic) bestowed onto some, and not others.” Bestowing more power and privilege upon Indigenous people is really what Sinclair is aiming for.

“Canada’s economy will never realize its potential without the involvement of Indigenous nations. The benefit of working co-operatively with Indigenous cultures and communities will, hopefully, mean that we will save the environment together before capitalism, competitiveness and individuality kill us all.”

Sinclair is basically inverting the role of White Saviour. Ironically, he wrote this while in Coquitlam, B.C., before the Carney government announced that it had made a deal with the Musqueam band which granted them title to a massive portion of the B.C. Lower Mainland, including Coquitlam. Economic chaos and uncertainty have ensued and a large number of private property owners have discovered, without any prior notice, that their indefeasible fee simple titles are now defeasible.

Concordant with his soteriological esteem of Indigenous people, Sinclair spikes his advice with apocalyptic urgency: if we don’t follow Indigenous guidance, we’re doomed. That is more diktat than dialogue: listen or else.

His disdain of capitalism, competitiveness and individuality is telling. It belies a belief that Indigenous people were Nature’s socialists living in harmony with one another because the Creator had blessed the land with so much bounty that there was never any scarcity of resources to drive tribal competition for those resources.

For Sinclair, it would seem, the Paleolithic stasis that existed in North America before European exploration and colonization is an ideal median for human society. An unknown past is as great as you want to imagine it but having tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, can we go back to the Garden?

Individuality was ever the bane of atavistic collectives and feudal lords. Sinclair’s perspective that the Indigenous/non-indigenous dichotomy translates into a conflict between collectivism and individuality is another ‘impossible difference.’ Human excellence is not fostered by subduing the self. It is hard to be an individual and always has been but that is how humanity matures. The alternative is attested by the feral oblivion that existed here since time immemorial until Contact.

The increasingly feudal disposition of Canada’s Indian Reserves inflicts a captive collectivism where many band members dare not speak out against the ruling families for fear of being punished by those families running the band council. If your family relies on band welfare or band housing, do you dare question the band council in any way?

Bernadette Anderson (Facebook).

Rare is the individual band member who so dares and Bernadette Anderson is such an individual. Sinclair doesn’t have to live with the on-reserve consequences of his advocacy. Anderson doesn’t want to live with them, either, and understands what Sinclair’s treaty status quo means for her people. She is vocal in her criticisms of the reserve system and band politics and she has been called a racist to her own people. She is a Prometheus rebelling against the Old Gods.

Sinclair, on the other hand, murmurs lullabies of Reconciliation to a fashionably discontented bourgeoisie whose outrage is manufactured so it can be managed. It is performative social justice.

“Know that what we are doing in (sic) now runs counter nearly (sic) 150 years of Canadian policy and practice; our personal needs should take a back seat to those of our children and grandchildren.”

That is hubris masked as selflessness and it is intellectually dishonest. Sinclair is not countering either the policy or the practice of the past 150 years. He is simply presenting an alternate narrative to justify continuing the same policies and practices of Indian status, reserves and civil inequality. His attempt to pepper that narrative with pending doom if unheeded is just a rhetorical device to proscribe critical thinking and that is probably why he sees individuality as a problem: no ideologue wants people thinking for themselves. If the decades since the Red Paper show us how horribly wrong was Cardinal, what more are we willing to tolerate for the sake of Sinclair’s reiteration of Indigenous exceptionalism?

In its lead-up to Reconciliation Week, the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) staged several Lunch & Learn webinars on various subjects related to Indian Residential Schools (IRS). The final course on the menu was “Confronting Residential School Denialism,” moderated by “one of the leading global experts on residential school denialism,” Dr. Sean Carleton.

Joining Carleton was the ever earnest Dr. Niigaan Sinclair and Eugene Arcand, a residential school ‘Survivor’ presently serving on the NCTR’s Survivors Circle.

Screenshot: Confronting Residential School Denialism.

To their collective chagrin, the scourge of residential school denialism is “very much on the rise.”

Certainly, Time has not been their ally. Every anniversary of the Kamloops 215 announcement that passes without a resolution of the mystery, the public understandably grows all the more skeptical and therefore more susceptible to the guiles of denialists. For all the fury and indignation following the news that 215 children’s remains had been discovered, any citizen has to wonder why excavation hasn’t yet happened, especially when Tk’emlups te Secwepemc received millions of dollars from the Federal government for that purpose. There is also a moral deficit of over one hundred burned churches to account for, a score that exceeds the number of churches torched in America during the civil rights movement.

It also doesn’t help their cause that the way Carleton et al confront residential school denialism resembles guttersniping more than a frontal assault. As elsewhere, Carleton and guests avoid actually naming any residential school denialists nor do they cite or quote any actual statements from these denialists. Like any academic should know, you have to understand your opponent’s argument in order to counter it and typically, a scholar would present examples of their opponent’s arguments to help persuade the reader that they understand it enough to have critically examined it. Perhaps Carleton and Sinclair figure that the less said about denialists and their work, the better, but it is not intellectually satisfying: ignoring arguments isn’t defeating them.

Arcand came closest to identifying a denialist when he mentioned, “lunatics … who showed up at the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation yesterday … requesting a level of respect because they’re doctors.” Arcand was referring to Dr. Frances Widdowson who appeared outside of the NCTR’s provisional office on the University of Manitoba campus on Sept. 25 to perform a Spectrum Street Epistemology. Arcand added that this doctor was “terrorizing our sacred places. You don’t see the same behaviour coming from us to the Catholic churches who destroyed me or destroyed us.”

Of the 123 churches burned down since the Kamloops announcement, the vast majority have been Catholic.

Carleton defined residential school denialism as the “willful downplaying, minimizing or twisting to undermine residential school knowledge and shake public confidence in Truth and Reconciliation.” Residential school denialism comes from a “handful of people creating and profiting from residential school denialism.” Exactly how denialists profit from their endeavours wasn’t made clear by Carleton but perhaps he was alluding to the Amazon bestseller, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools).

As one of the contributing authors, I can assure Carleton and the reader that none of the authors received anything more than a free print copy of the book.

Carleton believes that denialists see Reconciliation as a threat but he doesn’t suggest why they would. Part of their strategy, he claims, is to “distract us by focusing on minutiae and details.”

Minutiae, like the utter absence of any missing child reports from any parents whose child went missing one day at school. Details, like the fact that the TRC itself found no credible evidence of any homicide being committed by any staff against any student for the entirety of the IRS period.

Carleton, the NCTR et al have chosen to go all in on the Kevin Annett inspired tale of missing and murdered children associated with IRS. Perhaps it was simply because of the worldwide attention that was garnered with the Kamloops 215 announcement but it is now routine to hear NCTR, for instance, invariably mention “the children that never returned home” in media releases.

Another detail that Carleton et al would like to ignore is that the claim of missing children in unmarked burials was proven false when the Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray told the Senate Committee on Indigenous People, “There are no missing children; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because parents were never told where they were buried.”

Of the few excavations conducted of suspected unmarked burial sites identified by GPR and Knowledge Keepers, no human remains have ever been found which confirms what Murray related: there are none to be found.

Faced with that inconvenient truth, Carleton et al focus on known deaths that can be tendentiously associated with the schools. The NCTR has been especially egregious on this score. While only 423 students’ deaths are known to have occurred on school premises, the NCTR has chosen to promote a commemorative campaign for former IRS students who passed away within a year of their attending a school regardless of the actual location of their demise. Consequently, the NCTR states that more than 6,000 students died “as a result of the residential school system” but most died for reasons unrelated to the IRS and far from any school. Unless a person was aware of NCTR’s gratuitous terms of inclusion for its Memorial Register, they would probably assume that thousands died at the schools because of the schools. Details matter.

In the same vein of insinuating nefarious demise, Arcand held up his 1958 class photo from residential school. Arcand remonstrated that of the 32 kids in the photo, only 7 were now alive, 67 years later. “Not one committed suicide, not one. They had every right to and every reason to with everyday threats of physical, sexual and spiritual abuse. I was a part of and a witness to the destruction of a people!”

Niigaan Sinclair boasted that he “could pick apart any residential school denialist arguments. There is probably nobody more fraught with terrible things than residential school denialists.” Sinclair explained that residential school denialism is based on three central purposes: 1) to say Indigenous people are lying; 2) to say Indigenous people are exaggerating; and 3) to say that Indigenous people want power, fame and money.

Sinclair then says: “Today’s kids have learned that Indigenous people have created everything that we know of as Canada from healthcare to multiculturalism, to democracy, to free speech, to every penny on every paycheque, to every single way that we see the country. Indigenous people are absolutely the heart of everything that is Canadian.”

Sinclair added that we need to recognize that Indigenous and treaty rights are at the core of this country and that we need to keep funding bodies like the NCTR.

The theme of monetary gain figured prominently in this discussion. Arcand was particularly aggravated by how “many settler professionals and para-professionals who made a damn good living and became millionaires off the back of the residential school settlement agreement. Nothing is said of the settler lawyers who took advantage of residential school survivors in this settlement process; nothing is said of the fly-by-night companies who set up ground penetrating radar companies to come into our communities and say that we’ll find if for you and withholding the results until they were paid more money, “ (Arcand did not provide an example).

“If you want to accuse residential school survivors were all doing this for money, then why are we still in poverty?” argued Arcand. “The minimal thousand, ten thousand dollars that we got for this or that all went back to the settler community.”

“You take First Nations, Metis and Inuit people out of any social sector in every large center, including Winnipeg: you take us out of the education sector, within one month, the City of Winnipeg education system would go bankrupt. You take us out of any provincial, federal, justice, incarceration, probationary, young offender, uh, criminalization by RCMP, city police and other police forces in this country and you take us out of that sector, again, they would go bankrupt.”

Arcand doesn’t seem to understand that the education system, for one, is funded by taxes and would continue to be funded by taxes regardless of whatever extra demands might be placed on the system. Arcand appears to be saying that aboriginal social dysfunction is big business while not understanding that state services are not actually businesses. However, increased federal transfers to a province could be argued for on the basis of increased need.

“I’m not even talking about health; I’m not even talking about the other social sectors,” continued Arcand. “That’s the reality of what the root of the residential schools caused in this country. It made … one segment of society an industry that, in Western Canada, if we were taken out of that sector, you’d be the ones homeless: the settlers and the newcomer community would be the ones who are homeless.”

Niigaan Sinclair chirped, “This is funny. This is where we kind of get into an ironic moment as a country. Health, justice, social services: we have emergency situations in all of those industries and we have to do something about it yesterday.”

Sinclair and Arcand agree that there is an aboriginal industry and that its chief economic driver is the residential school experience. If responding to residential school harm and its prorating cousin, intergenerational trauma, is a primary source of funding for pretty much everything in society, wouldn’t exaggerating and playing up the harms of IRS be an incentive to generate more money, particularly for someone who thinks these are industrial sectors requiring urgent investment?

Both Sinclair and Arcand situate residential schools as the cause of all pathologies and poor social outcomes within the aboriginal community. Neither wants to consider other possibilities that might account for such profound social problems such as the reserve system and the sheer fact of treating Indians differently from other citizens for the entirety of Canada’s existence. Generally speaking, Canadians have been and increasingly are socialized to think of aboriginal peoples as a separate people, if not a separate culture and race entirely.

After Arcand complained about Indigenous people “being an industry in our own country,” Sinclair added: “Canada has built an entire economy now off of the trauma and legacies from the schools themselves: the jail system, sorry, the justice system, the healthcare system, the education system and continues to profit. I agree very much with Eugene that, if you removed Indigenous people from the equation, in virtually every corner of the country, um, there would be a lot of systems that would just be financially inoperable.”

How does the state profit from social service expenditures?

Given the duration of the IRS, Sinclair argues that the trauma and social pathologies created by the IRS are such that an entire economy has been historically developed administering to those affected, directly and indirectly, by the IRS. To the extent that the announcement of 215 children’s remains being found supercharged the existing aboriginal industry, Sinclair et al do not wish to douse the turbo with any doubts about the truth of those phantom deaths. It is telling that, in this NCTR panel discussion, no mention was made at all of the 215 claim or that of missing children in unmarked burials associated with the IRS. Instead, Carleton and Sinclair disingenuously spoke of deaths and disappearances, reflecting a sensitivity to the growing attention to the lack of evidence to support claims of nefarious deaths.

“There were tens of thousands of children who went to the schools and disappeared,” claimed Sinclair. “We know that many of them died; we don’t know quite how many. Some (students) may have left (or ) married but all of this is a signifier of death, physically or culturally.”

Trying hard to prove some sort of genocide occurred at the IRS and aware of the necessity to establish intent to prove genocide, Sinclair engaged in convoluted rhetoric about “mental intent.”

“Ask any Survivor: there was absolutely mental harm and not only was there mental harm, there was intentional mental harm every single day of your experience (in IRS).”

With an absence of self-reflection that is symptomatic of habitually dwelling in an echo chamber, Sinclair advises others: “Don’t get caught up in trying to re-define definitions to meet your facts. That’s called ‘confirmation bias.’”

The hostility towards any critical examination of the negative residential school narrative belies just how valuable that narrative has become to aboriginal special interest advocates. Proponents of the narrative need to scale the damages caused by the residential school experience to account for the profound dimensions of contemporary problems within the aboriginal community.

Arcand recounted a visit he made that morning to a classroom of “9, 10, 11, 12 year-olds. All of them, every one of them is a descendant of a residential school Survivor in some capacity. They have already experienced racism, they have already experienced poverty, they have already experienced levels of family violence, gangsterism, and all the social ills of life and I can say that 50% of the people that are watching and listening to this, can I say that they have experienced the same thing? Are we the only minority there also?”

The figure of the residential school denialist functions as a scapegoat. If you’re fortunate enough to be one of the activists enjoying enhanced career opportunities from the negative IRS narrative, the cost of falsely attributing the cause of so much social pathology is merely one of professional dignity and perhaps personal integrity. But for one of those children in the classroom that Arcand visited, what are they learning?

They are being told that all of the social ills that they have experienced at so young of age, all the family problems that they live with, stem from something that existed decades before they were born. Perhaps these children learn to see their family’s dysfunction as a consequence of things that happened to their grandparents and great-grandparents but the underlying lesson is one of despair that their parents couldn’t rise above whatever adversity they experienced. One cruel reality for these children is that they are used as proof that residential schools caused and is causing trauma.

If only a handful of people are profiting off of residential school denialism and there is an entire economy built off of the trauma and legacy of residential schools, whose motives should be suspect? Clearly, there is an economic value being assigned to anyone identified as a ‘residential school Survivor.’ That value peaked after the Kamloops announcement and it is in peril of being diminished if the 215 claim is fully exposed as false. Intoning genocidal victimhood helps sustain that peak value while also shielding those proponents with pity.

For all the economic value assigned to ‘Survivors’, it holds even greater political value. The multitudinous social pathologies that Arcand described exist but the question is why they exist. Arcand might have convinced himself that he survived some sort of genocide and there are definitely a lot of actors who want him to keep believing that but to those children in the classroom, it means, in practical terms, that any further sociological inquiry has ceased.

For as much as Arcand and Sinclair recognize the appalling preponderance of aboriginal social pathologies in society, they seem to resent that reality. Blaming residential schools gives them a white devil to focus their resentment upon while also allowing them to preserve their romantic conceit of cultural superiority. To the children in the classroom, though, it means their generation gets expended defending the value of residential school victimhood.

Dr. Frances Widdowson.

When friend, co-author and colleague, Frances Widdowson privately discussed her intention to come to the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg to do a Spectrum Street Epistemology (SSE), I warned her about the danger she would face. Winnipeg is the mecca of aboriginal militancy in Western Canada and these militants have been steadily feeling bolder after several incidents where law enforcement gave them a pass, most notably the rampage on the Legislature Grounds on Canada Day (!) 2021 when the statues of Queens Victoria and Elizabeth II were vandalized and toppled. Instead of receiving criminal charges, the Orange Shirts and their camouflaged warriors were graced with a commemorative garden on the grounds.

“We took the Kings grandmother’s crown (Queen Victoria) After unmarked graves of our indigenous children were discovered Victory for the IndigenousResistance,” (FB; trophy taken after the rampage on the Manitoba Legislative Grounds CANADA DAY 2021).

I warned Frances that she couldn’t count on enforcement if things got ugly and that two groups in particular would probably show up: the First Nations Indigenous Warriors (FNIW) and Crazy Indian Brotherhood. Frances didn’t think it would get that bad. As she jokingly replied, “I guess I should get my personal affairs in order.”

Frances announced two dates for two events. She would do her SSE at the University of Manitoba on Sept. 25 with the topic: “The ‘Grave Error’ at Kamloops Was a Hoax.” On Sept. 26, Frances planned to do a SSE at the University of Winnipeg (my alma mater) on the subject: “Residential School Denialism is a Barrier to Reconciliation.”

The U of M event went relatively calmly and there was some great discourse. The U of M had adequate security that kept control of the crowd. Plainclothes security were also present. Only two FNIW militants in camo were present (they would make their presence more forcefully known the next day). As moderate as the U of M event went, I knew that the U of W location would pose much greater risks because of its proximity to where most of these militants live. Within walking distance, several FNIW have been unlawfully occupying the once-heralded Thunderbird House for weeks now. Plus, the militants had Thursday night to coordinate themselves.

I warned her videographer, Daniel Page, a Professor of Computer Science at the U of M who was simply volunteering his time to record the events on Frances’ behalf, that the situation at the U of W was probably going to be a lot worse than the U of M. He heeded my warning but if you’re not used to violent, irrational rage given social license over law and order, you perceive the threat abstractly. Like Mike Tyson said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Screenshot of Winnipeg Free Press, Sept. 22, 2025.

I knew it was going to be ugly at the U of W and I knew that Frances didn’t realize how bad it could get. She is used to dealing with angry students and not freelance militants of low cognitive faculty stoked for political violence. Branded, like myself, as a ‘residential school denialist’, publicly appearing as one after a constant feeding by media, local academia and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation itself that said denialism constitutes an “ongoing harm,” Frances was presenting herself as a target to a crowd hungry for one.

POV of Frances Widdowson when she was sitting on the ground and surrounded; Tre Delaronde of First Nations Indigenous Warriors.

In all good conscience, I could not let her walk into that jungle alone.

Frances was swarmed the moment she appeared. Because he was obviously recording everything, Daniel Page was accosted and shoved back dozens of meters. He tried to explain that he was a professor and just there to take video but the value of academics was lost on this crowd before he got there. A sweet soul was driven to tears in the face of physical belligerence and mocked for it. These are the kind of people who cheer the death of Charlie Kirk, who want to set the world on fire and watch it burn. It’s an ignorant self-righteousness that justifies its violence.

“Hi, I’m Ben from the Blackfoot tribe and this bitch (Frances) hasn’t cried enough white tears yet.”

For something like 90 minutes, Frances was surrounded on all sides by women mostly bigger than her, banging drums and shaking rattles in her face, shouting abuse and spewing vitriol. With evident practice, some of the Orange Shirt women held up Every Child Matters flags to block the view of what was going on immediately around Frances: a good tactic if you want something not to be witnessed. In videos you can see women trying to restrain others who are letting their rage take over.

One citizen kept close to Frances for as long as he could and, thankfully, he at least had the authoritative bearing of a secret service agent. Later on, I saw him get clocked twice in the face deliberately by one of the Orange Shirt women banging a drum who exaggerated her back swing to strike him. He did not react. It was clear from the start that campus security was willing to let things escalate.

The Orange Shirts’ strategy was to try and escalate things. For example, if I was standing too near Frances, several Orange Shirt women would try and shove me. If I tried to hold my place, they would shout that I was shoving them. Then several CIB and FNIW members would swarm me and threaten violence if I touched “their women.” At one point, the campus security lead was standing next to me when I was shoved by one of the women. I asked him if he saw that because I knew that he did; he did a Sgt. Schultz instead.

The Orange Shirt women continued to push away any white-looking guy from being within 15 feet of Frances. Once pushed away, most of us were surrounded by several FNIW, CIB and other fellow travelers. They baited all of us to take a swing but one thing I learned about jail in Manitoba, if you fight one, you’ll be fighting them all. I was challenged several times to a fight, on or off campus, but this wasn’t the first time I had been confronted with stupid, juvenile male posturing. I knew that if any fistfights broke out, things would get much worse and Frances would probably be attacked and beaten. This was a lynch mob itching for a pretence; getting Frances out of there safely was my objective.

The narrative of missing and murdered children associated with residential schools is a political myth that serves the Orange Shirts much in the same way as the ‘Blood Flag’ worked for the Nazis, except for one significant difference. For the Orange Shirts, the political myth of dead babies also serves a psychological function: all the problems in their lives, their families and their communities can be placed wholly outside of themselves. It is easier to blame the government, the churches and colonialism than to look within at people who are supposed to be, for instance, kind and loving parents.

All Saints Ukrainian Orthodox Parish of Bellis, Alta. after the fire in September 2025 (credit: Global News).

The obvious problem with this false attribution of cause is that it doesn’t address the real problems within aboriginal communities. For example, calling the problem of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women a genocide has done nothing to halt the disappearances and homicides, the majority of which by far are committed by domestic partners and people known to the victims.

In the aftermath of that eventful Friday on the campus of my alma mater, it is sadly telling how negligible has been any local reporting of the calamity. Perhaps news directors collectively decided to hush the news so as not to discourage public participation in the pending Orange Shirt Day ceremonies which, of course, prominently featured several of the perpetrators of Orange Friday’s violence, including Viv Ketchum and Geraldine Shingoose (yes, we have video). Perhaps they are afraid of offending their federal sponsors or are just afraid of the Orange Shirts who are politically ascendant and notoriously violent. Perhaps they really believe in the social mission of Truth and Reconciliation and do not wish to show the studded gloves of the Orange Shirts’ paramilitary wing so as not to distract from the pity parade. Perhaps, most of all, they were afraid of public sympathy for Frances and her cause.

If you’re a news director and you’re willing to ignore the violence and threats to free speech of last Friday, I think you’re tacitly condoning those attacks and I think you’re willing to excuse the perpetrators because projecting genocidal victimhood allows you to feel comfortable with your soft bigotry of low expectations. But Orange Friday is what happens when people internalize those low expectations and act like rabid, antisocial, juvenile delinquents filled with an ignorant self-righteousness.

The British historian, Michael Burleigh wrote: “Beware the sacralized collective.” The absolute victimhood assigned to aboriginal people has given some a sense of being absolutely entitled to act outside of the law. And when law turns a blind eye, the Orange Shirts feel all the more empowered to do as they please. If Winnipeg burns one day, it will be because of this.

Joan Jack

“There is a fundamental difference in worldview that continues to undermine the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Crown in Canada,” writes Ojibway lawyer Joan Jack. “A difference that can be summarized as relational versus transactional.”

As Jack sees it: “The Canadian legal system, rooted in British common law and contract theory, is predicated on this logic: define the parties, negotiate terms, settle obligations and enforce compliance.” Joan doesn’t mention that this contract theory has an intellectual heritage going back to the earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia. Anyone can look back into the historical record and see the evolution of legal principles from the Code of Hammurabi to British Common Law; there are millennia of reflection and consideration aggregated in what we presently define as law.

Code of Hammurabi

In contrast, Indigenous legal traditions are based on a relational perspective: “Our legal orders are rooted in relationships: with one another, with the land, with the spirit world, and with all living beings. Rights and responsibilities emerge from these relationships and are understood to be reciprocal, evolving and enduring. Agreements are not static but require ongoing renewal, ceremony and care.”

The basic difference between transactional and relational legal orders is that the former seeks to define and fix terms to fulfill an agreement to the mutual satisfaction of all parties involved, and the latter allows itself to be fluid and flexible in order to modify terms as conditions change. In the western legal system, a party who neglects or fails to meet the terms of their agreement may be held liable for not meeting those terms. The parties understand their responsibilities which are generally laid out clearly so that even an impartial third party could understand them.

In the Indigenous system (leaving aside the question of whether or not it is a system), a party can be found liable for circumstances that could not possibly have been foreseen at the time of forming an agreement. How does one, for instance, factor in what the spirit world thinks about the fulfillment of a contract? Indeed, how does one even determine what the spirit world is thinking?

Similar problems arise with incorporating “the land.” Jack doesn’t mean ‘land’ here in the prosaic sense of real estate; she is invoking a mythical perspective of the land as a sentient entity with its own wishes. Who speaks for the land better than those who are Indigenous to the land? With the western tradition of law, everyone is equal because the legal principles are universally applicable. In the Indigenous tradition of law, the Indigenous parties are favored by being the natural representatives of ‘the land’ and ‘the spirit world.’

If agreements in the Indigenous legal order require ongoing renewal, Indigenous parties can define that renewal by calling upon the wishes and needs of the land and spirit world. The last word would always go to the shaman, at least when it came to a legal dispute between Indigenous and non-Indigenous parties.

The western tradition of law seeks to avoid disputes and if disputes do arise, to resolve them in a reasonable manner that does not lead to further disputes; that is why determinacy matters so much. Indeterminacy is inherent in the Indigenous tradition and disputes aren’t likely to ever be settled with new disputes bound to arise in the adjudication process. What if two different shamans from two different tribes disagree on what the spirit world is telling them?

One of the most popular conceits amongst aboriginal identarians is that they possess an indigenous worldview. The concept of worldview originated in German political thought (Weltanschauung) and was something Hitler banged on about a lot. In his seminal work on Hitler’s worldview, Eberhard Jaeckel distinguishes worldview as something more than merely a view of the world.

Jaeckel points out that, in the narrow sense of worldview, everyone possesses one: “Even the totally illiterate, the totally primitive, indeed even the mentally deranged have an image of their surroundings, a view of the world,” (P. 23) But what comprises a worldview in the broader sense is incorporating the individual parts of that view of the world into a comprehensive and programmatic response which necessarily requires a “visible systematic and inherent coherence,” (P. 24). Worldview is, thus, not merely a perception of the world but a plan to interact with the world on the basis of that perception.

“Every Weltanschauung, though it may be right a thousand times over and of the highest value to mankind, will remain without importance for the practical working out in detail of a nations’ life, unless its principles have become the banner of a fighting movement…. The transformation of an ideal conception of the highest veracity, based upon a comprehensive Weltanschauung, into a definitely limited, tightly organized political community of believers and fighters, unified in spirit and will power, is the most significant achievement, for the possibility of a victory of the idea depends exclusively on its fortunate resolution,” Adolf Hitler.

‘Indigenous worldview’ is an anachronism in the same way that ‘Turtle Island’ is: people who could not perceive the world could not formulate a view of it. Jack’s use of worldview owes everything to contemporary identity politics and an intent to politically dignify Indigenous exceptionalism with a fundamentally distinct set of values and principles. Jack fails the necessary “programmatic thinking” of a worldview by introducing vague and subjective elements like the ‘spirit world’ that defy any systematic or objective rendering. By definition, worldview cannot be esoteric.

Like her gratuitous use of ‘worldview’, Jack relies heavily on the political myths peculiar to aboriginal nationalism:

“But perhaps the deeper issue is one that rarely enters the legal or political conversation: the general Canadian public does not see us for who we are. We are the Indigenous peoples of these lands. We did not come from elsewhere. These are our homelands. Yet for over 150 years, the dominant narrative in Canada has been that any obligations owed to us — as the original landowners — have been extinguished, fulfilled or no longer apply.

As a result, Canadians largely do not recognize us as landowners in any meaningful legal or political sense. And if we are not seen as landowners, we are not seen as legitimate treaty partners or governments. This fuels a lack of public support for governments to engage with us on a true government-to-government basis. In short, the public misunderstanding of our place on these lands gives Canadian governments permission to continue relating to us transactionally — as stakeholders, not rights-holders.”

Can the Indigenous tribes present before Contact be honestly considered as the original landowners? I don’t think so. If there was no system of writing to define territory and title to that territory, how was ownership of any land defined and determined? No doubt tribal territory was often demarcated in some way but those were territories held by force more often than they were peacefully agreed upon boundaries. Occupation isn’t the same as ownership, as Jack argues.

Jack’s appeal to a public regard for ‘her people on these lands’ is an argument of Indigenous exceptionalism: by virtue of being here first, Indigenous people warrant exceptional regard in the government of Canada. Especially so, because as people of this land, they have a special relationship with the natural land, its creatures and its spirit world and one of the features of that special relationship is being able to understand the land and the spirit world and to be able to speak for them. Essentially, by virtue of their ancestry, Indigenous people have an organic psychic bond with physical Canada and whatever spiritual dimension it may possess.

The myth of dispossession is a moral argument while the myth of a special relationship with Nature is an argument of spiritual authority. Because a special relationship with nature is a belief, it isn’t falsifiable as a claim and works well as a political gambit because disputing such a claim is liable to fetch one accusations of racist bigotry. The claim of exceptionalism grates against the principles and traditions of liberalism, especially when that exceptionalism is construed upon racial lines.

Because Jack is stating an ideological position as an activist, her rhetoric hurdles fences where the lawyer in her might otherwise pause. The statement that “Treaties were not land surrenders” is a howler. All the Numbered Treaties include a passage like this from Treaty 1:

“The Chippewa and Swampy Cree Tribes of Indians and all other the Indians inhabiting the district hereinafter described and defined do hereby cede, release, surrender and yield up to Her Majesty the Queen and successors forever all the lands.”

On this Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada page, an entire section lists a couple dozen treaties under the heading, “Upper Canada Land Surrenders.”

Is part of respecting Indigenous worldviews disregarding facts whenever it doesn’t suit aboriginal nationalist narratives? It is mind-boggling to consider the implications of re-aligning the governance of Canada with a view that no land was ever surrendered in treaty but no one could doubt the ensuing chaos and if Indigenous legal orders are “living, sovereign systems,” what end would there be to that chaos? If it would even be possible to achieve any resolution in that scenario, what permanence would it have if some few weeks hence, some chief said actors in the spirit world were opposed to the resolution?

If such an Indigenous legal order pertained, there would literally be no point signing any agreements because all agreements are subject to revision by the Indigenous parties as they see fit.

While Jack argues for an alternate Indigenous legal order to prevail, she confusingly relies on the colonial legal order and its “constitutionally protected Aboriginal and treaty rights.” At the time of drafting, S. 35 was woefully mute on defining what exactly are those rights and judicial activists have typically defined and augmented those rights over the years since repatriation of the Constitution. Nevertheless, it is the so-called colonial legal order that gives those rights protection and permanence in law. Is comparable protection and permanence possible in an alternate legal order where flux is the norm?

If, “Rights and responsibilities emerge from these relationships and are understood to be reciprocal, evolving and enduring,” what rights anyone has today may not be the same rights that they have tomorrow. Scarier still, imagine the sliding scale in the likely case of deference to the rights of those of the land who speak for the land. For that to happen, the Practice Directive currently in force simply has to become a general legislative disposition.

The menace of blather like ‘Canada is a post-national country’ is that it leaves a vacuum for aboriginal nationalism. Jack is showing us how fundamentally illiberal Canada could become out of this existential state of vulnerability. A civil hierarchy predicated on aboriginal primacy could easily degenerate into a racial hegemony.

A Dialogue with a Graver

Credits: National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation

What has been sorely missing in the whole question of missing children in unmarked burials at former Indian Residential Schools (IRS) is any debate about the validity of the claim that there are actually students who went missing and were presumably murdered if their burials were clandestine. More than any other organization in Canada, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) ought to be encouraging such a debate. Without first determining the truth, how can reconciliation otherwise be achieved?

The NCTR has periodically hosted webinars on the subject of missing children in unmarked burials and when their latest session was advertised on Facebook, I posted the following comment:

“Can you confirm the existence of an unmarked burial associated with IRS? And I mean an unmarked burial, not an unmarked grave. That is, a burial that was intended to be kept secret. The NCTR seems to be devoting a lot of energy to a very touchy topic without providing any clear evidence of any missing children in unmarked burial sites or any clear justification for why these unmarked burials are believed to exist.”

I never received an answer from the NCTR but I did irk one Stacey Mortimer who scanned my posts and chose to engage me over a video from 2021 I recently re-posted about people ‘knowing’ that there were missing children buried at the former Kamloops IRS. To her credit, Mortimer at least initially challenged me to a debate which is more than can be said of any of the academic proponents of the missing children in unmarked burials claim. What follows is the dialogue she and I had on the subject. I think this is worth presenting here because it is typical of how the Gravers react to having their claims challenged. Although Mortimer claims to be a PhD student, her reactions and attitude are distinctly unacademic but, sadly, I have found the same reactions and attitudes amongst the dedicated academics, such as Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair.

***

(I have transcribed the original comment thread almost identically but have added a few words, some punctuation and reordered some comments for clarity. However, due to the lag between comments and Mortimer’s less than cogent replies, the dialogue is disjointed in spots. I have minimized alterations to Mortimer’s comments because I think her syntax is demonstrative of the Gravers’ general coherency. The first sentence is the caption I attached to the video post).

Me: A flashback to the phony news of May 27, 2021: “The Knowing.”

Mortimer: Come out from behind your keyboard and have this conversation in person. As a fellow Canadian your denialism is gross. And you decide to go on the National Truth and Reconciliation site. Our government committed genocide. This is part of that. You likely also deny the holocaust. You’re a keyboard coward.

Me: You’re being insulting and if you were honestly interested in a real debate, you would refrain from ad hominem. I’m not hiding at all. I have published on the question of IRS genocide several times including a chapter in the Canadian bestseller, Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). You’re welcome (as is anyone) to try and dispute any of the arguments presented in that book. It’s cheap on Amazon (Grave Error: How The Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools): Champion, Mr C P, Flanagan, Tom: 9798867599317: Books - Amazon.ca).

By the way, the Holocaust is my specialist topic and it deserves the capital H.

Mortimer: The genocide of indigenous children is mine and it deserves to be upheld and honoured, not denied by dicks like you. Keep it out of your disgusting mouth.

Me: The genocide of indigenous children is yours, eh? Okay. So, tell me, when did that genocide stop?

Mortimer: It hasn’t. It’s still ongoing. Do this in person. I am coming through Winnipeg in a month. Your denialism is disgraceful.

Me: The IRS genocide is still happening? Are you serious because that is a patently false statement. The IRS genocide cannot be continuing if the IRS ended c. 1997 (I’ve read as late as 1998). Do you understand that for it to be a genocide, those children had to have been killed, right? It’s basically mass murder in the first degree.

Mortimer: Let's do that about the holocaust.

Me: Let’s do what about the Holocaust?

Mortimer: Without this genocide you would not be lucky enough to be standing on these lands being so nasty. Stay away from Indigenous survivors and their families. Stay off the sites. Keep denying. As soon as legislation passes that makes you the criminal you are the world and this country will be a better place.

Me: Is it a fact that the remains of 215 children were discovered at the former Kamloops IRS?

Mortimer: The facts are there. It has been determined to be a genocide. The official national reports are available for you to read the facts. They are not there for you to put right call it fake news. You are a hateful person.

Me: What reports are you referring to? The TRC’s?

It’s a fact that Parliament passed a motion to characterize the IRS as a genocide but with neither trial nor debate, a 40-some second summary value judgment hardly proves the crime of genocide was committed at the IRS.

But suppose the schools really were a genocide. The LeBret (Qu’Appelle) school was taken over by the Qu’Appelle band in 1973 and they ran it till @1996+. Are you willing to also indict First Nations in the commission of IRS genocide, in addition to the many numbers of Indigenous students who graduated to employment within the schools (many of whom were female)?

It’s a free country and anyone on FB is free to allow or restrict public viewing and comments. It’s hypocritical of you to demand debate and then tell me to stay away from certain sites because you feel certain claims are not up for debate.

And if you’re a specialist on this supposed IRS genocide and you’ve chosen to start a comment thread on a video about the claim of 215 children’s remains discovered at the former Kamloops IRS, can you answer me two questions?

1. Do you have any names for any of the 200 children alleged to have been murdered and secretly buried in the orchard?

2. Can you explain why Tk’emlups Chief Casimir now refers to those children's remains she said were confirmed on May 27, 2021 as just “anomalies” because that kind of seems like the denialism you’re complaining about?

Please do give me your Winnipeg itinerary and consent to me DM-ing you because I have enough contacts here to arrange a public, live debate. You can tread where Carleton and Sinclair fear to go.

I would be happy to debate you or anyone else on the subject of IRS genocide because what I or any of the authors wrote in Grave Error has yet to be critically refuted. So far all we’ve seen is slovenly and boring, frankly, ad hominem. Canada could use someone in the pro-genocide camp actually engaging in debate.

Dare to be that innovator!

Mortimer: This is not a debate anymore than (sic) one could debate whether or not the holocaust is fake news. You don’t get to have an opinion on this genocide like your bullshit actually matters. It is hateful. It is racist, and it will be legislated a crime when the legislature is back up. Stay off the NCTR page with your hate.

Me: How is either ascertaining facts or debating hypotheses about what is factual hateful and racist?

You are clearly the one who is unwilling, unable or both to debate the question of IRS genocide. I am prepared to debate why I think the characterization of IRS as a genocide is false. You do not seem to be prepared at all to defend your POV here, never mind in a more formal debate.

But, as I am being more than fair to you here today, let me advise you that, although the perpetrators of the alleged IRS genocide are immune from prosecution according to the Rome Statute, if you can successfully present the case that this alleged genocide is still happening, you can gain some fame for yourself by filing a complaint with the International Criminal Court against Canada and the other parties involved in this genocide.

As for the NCTR page, it’s their page and they can manage it as they wish. If they, you, or anyone else cannot prove that there are actually missing children in unmarked burials, why should the claim of such be treated as a fact, no matter how indignant you or anyone else feels about the claim being challenged?

Mortimer: That is not how genocide is ever determined. Facts are determined. That was done. They are then measured by the UN standards of how genocides are defined. That was done. But you will know that. You are after all “an expert” on the famous genocide called the holocaust. Never a trial. Never debated. You are an IRS genocide denier. That is equivalent to denying the holocaust. Your insistence that you have some sort of right to debate this genocide is embracing (sic). Respect the children that died in this genocide and their living families and communities and keep your hate and denialism off the TRC pages.

Me: Again, is it a fact that the remains of 215 children were discovered at the former Kamloops IRS?

It’s a free country and anyone on FB is free to allow or restrict public viewing and comments. It’s hypocritical of you to demand debate and then tell me to stay away from certain sites because you feel certain claims are not up for debate.

And contrary to what you think would happen if disputing the claim of IRS genocide was criminalized, it would be the worst thing that could happen for the true believers like yourself because Canada would, by proxy, finally have its day in court and all these points of mine that you childishly evade with ad hominem would have to be addressed in a public trial that would likely receive plenty of media attention.

You and Gazan have that coming IMO.

Mortimer: Yes in theory they (First Nations IRS administrators and staff) would (be prosecuted) if anyone in the world of international law care (sic) to do their job. Also the criminals that perpetrated the atrocities should be held to account but like most countries that commit genocide it is highly unlikely. Just like all the others right. And do a bit of research. It has been declared genocide by this country on the floor of the house whether you like that process or not. This country is guilty of the genocide. Suck it up fragile little man.

Me: To be clear, then, if it was possible for anyone to be prosecuted for the alleged IRS, you would be in favour of including any Indigenous person who worked or administered any of these schools?

(Mortimer did not reply any further and promptly blocked me on FB.

Photo found on Facebook.

It’s midnight in Canada.

A federal election looms and never in this writer’s memory has an election been so wrought with fear and angst. Idle bluster from President Trump about annexing Canada has compelled many Canadians to fear for the country’s continued existence. The fear is irrational in my opinion; I don’t think there is any precedent for annexation between NATO partners nor should it be forgotten that Canada is a member of the Commonwealth.

Trump’s flippant musings about making Canada the 51st State has clearly touched a nerve and we have seen a flurry of slogans and flag waving which seems remarkable for a country whose parliament recently condemned as genocidal and whose former Prime Minister previously admitted to presiding over a different and ongoing genocide.

Amazingly, given that this is supposed to be a current problem, there has been no mention this election by any party of Canada’s “ongoing genocide” of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. We have truly reduced genocide to banality.

Is a genocidal nation-state worth defending? It is irrational to characterize Canada as something like a precursor of the Third Reich on one day and on the next to vow to defend Canadian sovereignty to the death. It should not be ignored that Canadian sovereignty is only to be defended against the Yanks. Any number of domestic nationalisms are free to declare their respective sovereignty and the federal government has been more than forthcoming in helping First Nations ‘renew’ their nation-to-nation relationship with Canada.

The reactionary nationalism belies an existential insecurity. Performing nationalistic indignity at an external bogeyman is a distraction, a release of the repressed insecurities of being Canadian. After years of the indigenous/non-indigenous dichotomy refracting the population into polar opposites of race and morality, and land acknowledgements that remind us of who really belongs here and who doesn’t reinforced with two guilty verdicts of genocide, what non-indigenous citizen doesn’t feel that nagging friction of uncertain legitimacy at both the individual and collective level?

Facebook post from Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak.

While performative angst rails against the threats to Canadian sovereignty posed by things an American president said, pieces of Canada are regularly hived off to this and that First Nation. Increasingly over the years, aboriginal sovereignty has furtively burrowed beneath our feet. ‘First Nation’ begs the question: who is the Second Nation?

Every citizen has seen the Trudeau government lavish all sorts of rights and benefits upon anyone with any quantum of indigenous DNA and it is small wonder that tens of thousands are discovering long-lost relatives in their family tree to turn it into that wonderful Christmas tree crammed with presents of preferential hiring and higher civil esteem.

Curse as those might who are not to the manor born, the spectral leviathan of collective self-doubt worms its way deep below the surface. The reality of different rights for different people on the basis of ancestry contradicts a fundament of the social contract as it is putatively understood: the guarantee of civil equality. If the promise of equality is no longer guaranteed, the social contract is breached upon which our civil society was previously grounded.

The rot began setting in decades ago.

Because of its origins as a British colony, Canada retains legislation from a period when Enlightenment values did not inform jurisprudence. Consequently, from 1763 on, Canada has had a different civil status than ordinary citizenship - Indian - and a reserve system. Preserving the indigenous population in their accustomed ways and habitats was rational in the 18th Century but come the 1960s, some Liberals recognized that the different rights that came from being Indian were not consonant with the ideal of human equality.

In 1969, then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chretien sought to rectify the ancien apartheid with the concept of the Just Society. This was when Canada had the best opportunity to preserve itself as a progressive liberal democracy with a future. However, the enlightened new policy was sharply rejected by aboriginal activists filled with decolonial theory. Trudeau bitterly let the treaty status quo continue: ‘We shall let them live in their ghettos for as long as they want.’

His petulant scorn aside, by accepting the defeat of this most liberal idea, Pierre Trudeau inadvertently planted the infernal dynamic that would lead to the dissolution of Canada as a coherent national project. Allowing the difference in rights to continue was making an exception to the universalism that was otherwise informing all of Canada’s social policies. Worse would follow.

In 1982, Pierre Trudeau patriated the constitution which somnolently included Section 35 which grandfathered in all pre-Confederation laws pertaining to Indians without specifying what set of rights exactly would apply to Indians. In subsequent years, S. 35 has been a bonanza for judicial activists seeking to enhance Indians’ rights in all ways.

If “discrimination breeds discrimination by example,” the thinking of 1982 was that positivist discrimination would breed discrimination in favour of social progressiveness. This was a somewhat manageable if fallacious assumption until a generation arrived which, weaned on a general contempt for society, began to covet the power to discriminate. Deconstructing society as any combination of regressive evils - colonial, systemically racist, patriarchal, etc. - in order to justify discrimination that would otherwise contradict human equality led to the fetishizing of deconstruction and an eventual foray into the rainbow frontiers of absurdity, such as ‘decolonizing autism.’

Charter Sec.15(II) allows for positivist discrimination if it is intended ‘to ameliorate conditions for disadvantaged groups.’ This effectively made ‘affirmative action’ (the conceptual precursor to what is now understood as DEI) legal. There are several flaws in 15(ii). When does the supposed advantage end and is there a point when the people of those groups are anticipated to possess enough personal agency to not require an institutional leg-up? The Charter’s presupposition that disadvantage is and will be imposed is presumptive, abstract and unjust. For one, it allows corrections to a problem that isn’t first proven to exist. For another, the correction is imposed upon generations that had nothing to do with any historical disadvantage that might have led the Charter authors to presuppose the continued existence of any wish to cause disadvantage; future generations are indefinitely indemnified to pay for the past mistakes of others.

As elder Liberals once postulated, the State is exemplifying the permissibility of discrimination when it cannot monopolize the attitude of discrimination.

From one Trudeau’s stumble to another, Indigenous exceptionalism has emerged as the greatest existential threat to Canadians. While conspicuous in its opposition to civil equality yet preserved by a sacrosanct deference, Indigenous exceptionalism confronts every Canadian with a fundamental, existential question: Do I really belong here?

Indigenous exceptionalism is trumping the universalism that modern Canada is built upon.

When people see positivist discrimination directed towards any group, it contradicts the assurances of universalism implicit in the social contract. Couple that with constant and increasing claims of sovereignty that tend to be dignified with policy and legislation, people naturally intuit that the place they knew as Canada isn’t so secure or stable.

Reacting to Trump’s remarks about Canada becoming the 51st State, the Assembly of First Nations made the following statement:

“First Nations’ core values are the antithesis of colonialist and imperialist mindsets. First Nations expect cooperation and respect from all nations. Our values of mutual responsibility among peoples and duties to all Creation, inform every aspect of our international diplomacy, intergovernmental relations, laws, policies and worldview. Our lands, our distinct laws, cultures, languages and ways of life anchor our place as distinct nations here in Canada and the broader international community. Our values strengthen us as distinct peoples. Our knowledge traditions are based on the land. They strengthen our inherent sovereignty, jurisdiction and title over our land and territories. Our relationship with Canada, as a successor colonial State, is complex and evolving. Every day, First Nations are exercising the right to self-determination. We are restoring our laws and inherent authority over our people and our traditional lands. We are busy dismantling old colonial ways and mindsets embedded in federal, provincial and territorial governments.”

The AFN presents a choice between becoming the next American state or being subjected to a wholesale reorganization of Canada based on First Nations laws and sovereignty. "We need to re-imagine Canada," said Val Napolean, the founding director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit at the University of Victoria.

It is psychologically discombobulating to consider that something so big as a nation-state could be unraveling. It is like discovering that your house was built on a fault line that is showing increasing seismic activity: the doom may be certain but the exact date and time remains unknown and the causes and forces are far beyond the ability of the individual to do anything about them. Small wonder then why so many have jumped into the reactionary nationalism of Canada. People can exorcise existential insecurities by rallying against the Yanks but it is a distraction from the real threats within that they can do nothing about.

Upon her election as the new AFN Grand Chief, Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak made an ominous statement:

“To Canada and Canadians, we need your support, you have to work with First Nations people in a good way. We are here in a good way. At the same time, there’s a point where, if you don’t listen to our people, you don’t listen to our chiefs – you don’t answer them – then there’s problems. And so to Canada, we’re coming for you.”

I cannot recall another federal election in which fear has been the primary motivating factor for the Liberal party. In tone, it is a complete reversal of the ‘sunny ways’ of 2015. Instead of leaning into all things progressive, the Liberal Party finds itself trotting out a succession of shibboleths to scare Canadians into mistaking continued Liberal government as stability. After climate crisis, systemic racism, misgendering and residential school denialism, Trump wins this shabby pageantry of things the Liberals can save us from.

Found on Facebook.

The performative angst masks the real Canadian existential terror.

Progressive moralizing has been Canadians’ traditional mode of compensating for relative insignificance on the global stage but rather than asserting the value of being Canadian, the thought of being annexed calls into question the continuation of Canada’s existence as an autonomous, sovereign nation-state.

Somehow Mark Carney (who, like his bête noire, Trump, never ran for political office until seeing an opportunity to win the top job in government) is pitched as the best candidate to deal with Trump. Since it is merely pantomime masking deeper issues, defiant slogans and nationalistic posturing suffice to numb the raw nerves throbbing beneath the surface.

If one arc of human history is to devise a form of government most informed of and conducive to humanity, liberalism has been the one ideology most commonly adopted because of the universal values it holds: freedom, equality and fraternity. Above all, equality is the one value upon which most of Canada was built and which the majority expects of Canada. It is, in effect, the state’s side of the social contract. In practical terms, the belief in human equality is reflected in equal rights.

Imagine what the newcomer student must wonder when every school day begins with a land acknowledgment: ‘Is this a statement of hierarchy and, if so, where am I?’ Indeed, imagine any one of us who has read Animal Farm and sees it unfolding in real time in our own backyards. There is not one of us who does not sense a deep-seated dread of a society where all of us are not equal: such societies do not end well.

Perhaps more than any other country, Canada has internalized the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). There has been negligible debate in Canada about the contradiction that UNDRIP poses to the preceding UN Declaration of Human Rights. Indigenous rights aren’t human rights in the sense of being universally applicable and if there is a conflict between those separate sets of rights, whose rights should prevail? First comes first?

Spock’s Maxim is quaint: the greatest good for the greatest number. But what if we are talking about a historically disadvantaged, colonially oppressed and dispossessed indigenous minority? Does justice then demand the greatest good for the smallest number?

A recent seminar was held on taking the ‘I’ out of BIPOC. What BPOC members lack is the fiat of indigeneity and the dual claims that they were here first and that all of this was theirs. Indigenous exceptionalism inexorably tends towards racialism because of the way it connects civil privilege and political authority with biological inheritance. If humanity matters most, it cannot matter who was here first. UNDRIP betrays humanity by making a political distinction of being indigenous.

The Oath of Citizenship was recently altered to include a pledge to faithfully observe the Constitution which “recognizes and affirms the Aboriginal and treaty rights of First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples, “ (they are different sets of rights). Almost as an afterthought, new citizens must pledge to fulfill their duties as a Canadian citizen.

Then there is the ponderous blob called Reconciliation wafting ominously over everyone’s head like the Kaiser’s zeppelin. Bereft of any consensual meaning yet over-charged with social significance, Reconciliation is wretchedly ambiguous and fails to explain how a reconciled society would be any different than the multicultural, liberal democracy that everyone was content with only a few years ago.

Many of these things were fermenting beneath the surface of the Canadian psyche before Trudeau was elected in 2015 but what Trudeau offered then was a telling escapism.

Fourth from left: Justin Trudeau (credits: CBC.ca).

As much as white privilege and toxic masculinity was eschewed at the time, an exemplar of those very things became Prime Minister because exception was what many people were idolizing. However, stormy days have replaced sunny ways and Carney can be seen as a negative version of Trudeau’s escapism. The red, white and blue shibboleth snaps at our heels now and like all of Canada’s other domestic nationalisms, we turn to cultural distinctiveness to define ourselves as a nation. Except there is no Canadian culture because there is no ethnic Canadian identity. And because Canadian liberalism has been in a state of degeneracy for over 50 years, we find ourselves parading socially popular virtues and offering Wokeism its last bastion in the free world just to not be like Trump’s Americans.

Credits: Mark Carney Facebook.

It’s all existential distraction, a fabulist conceit of fighting Goliath because the real enemies, the real divisions, are internal and at a near-absolute level of immutability in being constitutional. Acting out fears of becoming the 51st State lets Canadians ignore the reality of becoming the Second Nation for a little while longer.

Andrew Woolford (Credits: umanitoba.ca)

In his response to an article written by Jerry Storie (Residential schools: intentions and consequences, Jan. 20), Andrew Woolford criticizes the former NDP MLA and cabinet minister for sullying the legacy of Murray Sinclair with “residential school minimization and misrepresentation” (Column misrepresented Sinclair’s position, Jan. 22).

Storie argued that it was humane judiciousness on Sinclair's behalf that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did not categorize the Indian Residential Schools (IRS) as a genocide in the criminal sense. The TRC instead concluded that the IRS constituted a ‘cultural genocide’ which has no meaning in law. Rationalizations aside, the qualification relieved Sinclair and the TRC of having to meet the legal tests for proving genocide has been committed, the principal test being to prove intent.

On the face of it, educating a people presupposes their continued existence so where was the genocidal intent in the IRS?

Woolford correctly notes that the TRC did not have “adjudicative power” and that Sinclair “did not refuse to call residential schools a genocide.” In an August 2021 interview, Sinclair explained: “We avoided using the singular word genocide without a defining term (cultural) for a couple of reasons. One was that there was a legal prohibition in our mandate that said that we could not pronounce culpability.” Worried about deletion by the government and courts, the TRC “couched it as carefully as we could, but as clearly as we could, by referencing the term cultural genocide.”

The other reason was also rhetorical in purpose: “What we wanted people to focus on was not the number of children who died. If we had used the term genocide, the simple terminology, then we were causing people to focus upon the question of deliberate killing. And you can find acts of deliberate killing, there’s no question of that (the TRC did not find such acts). But they’re not as numerous as the many, many thousands of children whose lives were negatively affected, and whose existence was brutalized, by the lengths that were taken to eliminate their culture, their language, their sense of identity—and that had a much more significant long-term impact than the act of killing those children who were killed.”

When asked if acceptance of a genocide fosters reconciliation, Sinclair replied, “I think it brings home to people the fact that this was a deliberate effort to annihilate a race.”

For a supposed deliberate effort to annihilate a race, it was oddly partial given that only about a third of eligible children ever attended a residential school throughout the entirety of the IRS system. Another third attended day schools and the other third did not attend any school. Residential schools did have holiday and summer breaks and students were not detained after graduation. Given those windows of privacy and the common dignity of inner dialogue, it’s difficult not to imagine individuals exercising their personal agency to retain as much of their culture as they wished, if they wished to do so.

The fallacy of the argument that residential schools took away students’ culture lies in the assumption that students went to the schools with their traditional cultures intact. For one, that is an impossibility given some 200 preceding years of interaction with European explorers, fur traders, missionaries and settlers. What Woolford and others omit is the fact that, unless a child was admitted for humanitarian reasons such as being an orphan, parents had to enroll their children in the residential schools. Being church-run, the schools were denominational, meaning that parents enrolled their children according to their faith. If families were practicing a Christian faith before their children attended IRS, those families had already begun adapting aspects of a culture outside of their traditions.

Culture isn’t a static inventory and never has been. Humans have always adopted alien cultural aspects they deem to have benefit to themselves and their families. Adjudicating criminal liability for cultural genocide would not only inevitably delve into the messy matter of determining the parents’ own culpability (what about parents who brought radios and television into their homes), it would also question the role of Indigenous staff who worked at the schools and the several bands who took over the schools in their latter days of existence, such as Qu’Appelle where administration was transferred to the band in 1973.

Does anyone want to see Indigenous people being condemned for committing genocide against their own people? The people involved with operating the schools most likely to still be living are the Indigenous people who were involved with residential schools in their later years.

Like Sinclair and many other proponents of the IRS-as-genocide narrative, Woolford argues that assimilation amounts to genocide. Typically this has been how Article 2(e) – “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another” – of the UN Convention on genocide has been interpreted in the context of IRS assimilation. As is sadly typical of Woolford and his cohort, they omit the fact that the transfer has to be intended to be permanent and that there is some racial similarity between the groups in question. Article 2(e) was composed with the abduction of ‘Aryan looking’ Slavic children by the Nazis during WWII in mind.

Woolford states that “Indigenous children were dehumanized by the residential school system.” If we agree that the schools sought to assimilate Indigenous children, then the schools humanized those children because making a people more like you humanizes those people to you. Treating Indigenous people as a race apart from you is dehumanizing to both people.

Woolford accuses Storie of conflating intent with motive but then strangely does so himself by stating that Canadian settler colonialism sought “to denigrate and remove groups perceived as obstacles to land settlement, resource extraction and national consolidation.” If the intent was to destroy Indigenous peoples, why wouldn’t Canada have simply done nothing and left Indigenous people to eventually wither away on reserves without any means to survive in industrial society? There was no welfare state to speak of a century ago which is why the schools so often served as provisional orphanages and children’s shelters.

Woolford alludes to the specter of Bill C-413, a Private Member’s bill introduced by my own MP, Leah Gazan (NDP Winnipeg-Centre) to have the Criminal Code amended to include ‘residential school denialism’. While Woolford has some reservations about criminalizing denialism, he adds that “criminalization is not solely about correcting perpetrators.”

“It is also one way society recognizes certain actions are so harmful that they cross a line in terms of their acceptability. For victims, criminalization of denial thus provides recognition of the suffering residential schools caused to Indigenous Peoples and demonstrates a social concern not to exacerbate this suffering further by enabling disingenuous debaters who try to salvage residential schools from their genocidal history.”

Would Thomson Highway be considered as one of those disingenuous debaters for his memoir, Permanent Astonishment, in which he fondly recalls his years at residential school? After the sensational claim was made that 215 children’s remains were found near the former Kamloops IRS, Sinclair revised his assessment of the IRS as an unqualified genocide but is Tk’emlups Chief Roseanne Casimir guilty of denialism for now stating that only “anomalies” were discovered?

Sinclair suggested that there could be as many as 15-25,000 children missing from the schools and went to his grave without justifying a statement unsupported by the TRC’s own findings. Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray told the Senate Committee on Indigenous People that: “There are no missing children; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because parents were never told where they’re buried.”

Should anyone go to jail for asking the record to be set straight as to whether or not there is even a single child known to have gone missing from any residential school throughout their entire history, much less for demanding any evidence that priests threw living infants born from students they raped into school incinerators?

Both Woolford and Gazan justify criminalization of residential school denialism on the grounds that it will cause further harm to those students who suffered in the schools. Is it not also harmful to allow lurid tales such as priests murdering babies to circulate without scrutiny? What harm is done to former students such as Highway whose experiences contradict the genocide narrative? One former student I know of now says they attended a “private Anglican school” because they don’t want to have to defend their positive experiences against the wish to condemn the schools as singularly negative.

Whatever harm some may feel for being disabused of their tall tales of residential school villainy, is not the greater harm done to those who fear persecution – and possibly prosecution – for stating they knew the schools as a good thing? Must they feel a need to hide or lie about the good life they lived at the schools? Must their own experiences and memories of the schools be metaphorically pitched into a basement incinerator?

The wish to criminalize so-called residential school denialism does not serve anyone’s interests outside of a small number of malefactors seeking to derive personal gain from accusing Canada and the churches of committing what would amount to history’s longest-running genocide. Deny these ghouls their plunder by letting free and open critical discourse to continue.

(This first appeared on the Indian Residential Schools Research Group website, IRSRG, Nov. 14, 2024. I offer a proof that the claim was a hoax.)

The 215 Children’s Remains Found Claim: Was It a Hoax?

• November 14, 2024, 4:40 pm

Comments

Share

The 215 Children’s Remains Found Claim: Was It a Hoax?

Memorial at former Kamloops Indian Residential School c. June 2021 (Credits: NPR.org).

This past National Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada, Mi’kmaq lawyer and activist Pam Palmater featured ‘settler academic’ Dr. Sean Carleton on her Warrior Life Podcast. The topic was “Combatting Residential School Denialism,” a subject Carleton has been devoting a lot of attention to since the world was told that 215 children’s remains had been discovered in an old orchard near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (KIRS).

Drawing upon a paper he co-authored earlier, Carleton talked at length about the ‘mass grave hoax conspiracy theory’, a supposed right wing scheme to discredit the claim of 215 children’s remains being found as a hoax because some headlines incorrectly stated that a mass grave had been found.

Having once tweeted his own belief that a mass grave had been discovered at KIRS, Carleton awkwardly confessed that he, too, mistook the initial report as a mass grave having been found because he says he didn’t really understand what is a mass grave. 

In the podcast, Carleton pointed out that: “93.5% of articles (containing inaccuracies) released in the spring, summer, and fall of 2021 did not report the KIRS findings as being a ‘mass grave.’” Carleton and his co-author, Reid Gerbrandt, only studied Canadian headlines, though, and the news of a mass grave of Indigenous school children being discovered became an international headline. On May 28, 2021, for example, the New York Times ran the online headline, “‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” Carleton argued that ‘denialists’ capitalized on the few erroneous headlines to discount the discovery as a hoax. 

What Carleton omitted both in his paper and the podcast was the mention of ‘mass grave’ in an Assembly of First Nations resolution weeks after the initial May 27, 2021 announcement by the same Chief Rosanne Casimir who reported the discovery, and the reference to ‘mass grave’ in a complaint filed with the International Criminal Court by a group of lawyers on June 3, 2021.

The resolution clearly supposes there is more than just one mass grave.

In the official press statement made by Tk’emlups te Swepemec on May 27, 2021, there is no mention of a mass grave having been found. The claim of discovering 215 children’s remains was based on a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey that detected 215 soil disturbances, which is all GPR does: GPR can’t identify what caused those disturbances. Tk’emlups apparently chose to determine those disturbances were dead children missing from KIRS based, not on any documentary evidence of unresolved missing child reports, but on the ‘knowing’ of community members. Stories of mysteriously missing residential school students circulated for years at Tk’emlups and other reserves.

Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Chief Rosanne Casimir (Credits: CTVnews.ca).

While Tk’emlups initially reported the discovery as positive evidence of children’s remains, the First Nation has since walked back that claim to simply say that 215 “anomalies” had been detected by GPR. However, the popularity of the belief that children’s remains had indeed been found has become a factor in Tk’emlups’ media communication. A subsequent correction of the 215 number to 200 shortly after the May 27 announcement was set aside in the recent Tk’emlups revision because the ‘215’ number had become a potent symbol in activist circles. Effect rather than accuracy prevailed.

Firing for effect accounts for a lot of how the discovery of children remains was presented both to the media and the ICC. 

ICC complaint; (“GOC:” Government of Canada).

For decades now, a faction of the aboriginal special interest lobby has tried to condemn Canada as a genocidal state. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) disappointed this faction by declaring that the Indian Residential Schools were just a “cultural genocide.” The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry tried to accuse Canada of committing an “ongoing genocide” but the fact of actual convictions of individuals, predominantly Indigenous, undermined the rhetorical gambit. 

“Genocide in Canada: A Legal Definition;” published by Native Women’s Associciation of Canada.

The prospect of actually discovering scores of dead children in secret graves at former residential schools tantalized many activists hoping for the paramount moral leverage of genocidal victimhood. As Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray declared to the Senate Committee on Indigenous People in 2023, “We have said in this country, over and over, it was genocide. It was genocide.”

Finally, in an old orchard by a former residential school, there appeared to be genuine proof of Canada’s colonial genocide against Indigenous children: on May 27, 2021, Tk’emlups te Swepemc announced that it had discovered 215 children’s remains. 

We now know that no remains were actually found and it is unlikely that any will be found. There aren’t any names for any of these missing children; there are no parents wondering what happened to their children who mysteriously disappeared from school. 

Ironically, it was the specter of a mass grave having been found that put the lie to the whole claim.

The Timeline

During the May long weekend in 2021, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu conducted a GPR survey of the old KIRS orchard and now heritage park (its operation has since been suspended). On May 24 Beaulieu presented her findings to Tk’emlups in an oral report. We do not know what Beaulieu actually reported to the chief and council but, at a minimum, it was that she had found 215 soil disturbances. A wish to confirm local Tk’emlups lore apparently led to the conclusion by Tk’emlups that these soil disturbances must be clandestine burials of students. 

Dr. Sarah Beaulieu speaking (Credits: sightmagazine.com.au).

On May 25, Racelle Kooy, on behalf of Tk’emlups, contacted a few journalists, including Tanya Talaga, and presented Tk’emlups’ pending press statement concerning the discovery of 215 children’s remains. We do not know if the copy of the Tk’emlups statement that Kooy sent out matched what was officially announced on May 27 but from what Talaga mentions in her book, The Knowing,  there doesn’t appear to be any deviation from the public statement and the select journalists were not told of a mass grave. 

On May 26, Tk’emlups te Swepemc contacted the Tk’emlups RCMP detachment. We do not know exactly what Tk’emlups reported to the RCMP but it must have at least been the news that they had discovered evidence of 215 children’s remains on their reserve. The RCMP opened a file on May 26 and because it remains open to this day, the RCMP cannot disclose any information regarding the details of what they were told and what they said to Tk’emlups officials. 

However, logical inference can supply a good picture of how the RCMP responded to the report. If the RCMP had been told that a mass grave had been found, the RCMP would have pointed out that 215 separate graves are not a mass grave. Presumably, the RCMP attended the nearby orchard on May 26 and would have quickly realized that there was no forensic evidence of any graves or human remains nor any documentary evidence of any missing children. The RCMP were not presented with any evidence to indicate any criminal acts had been committed, including unlawful burial, and in a May 28 statement, the Tk’emlups detachment announced that it will be “following (the band’s) lead on the release of information at this time.” The RCMP has no grounds to pursue the matter as a criminal investigation and given what little evidence they have – highly dubious GPR results and hearsay – they would be unable to obtain a warrant to conduct excavations and possible exhumations.

By late June 2021, the Tk’emlups RCMP detachment was still being barraged with numerous media requests for more information on the discovery and s/Sgt. Bill Wallace Issued the following statement:

“The Tk’emlúps Rural RCMP has attended the site, participated in meetings, and will continue working closely with the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc community leaders in determining the next steps and the best way to be involved in any investigative avenues explored going forward, while at the same time being supportive, respectful, and culturally sensitive to the indigenous communities that are impacted. Following a meeting with Band officials on May 31, the RCMP confirmed that the Band remains as the lead Official at this time, and that the RCMP will continue to support the Band in determining next steps. A file has been opened and any further actions will be taken in consultation with the Tk’emlúps te Secwepemc First Nations.”

The question of what lies beneath the ground at KIRS was officially a civilian matter until material evidence appeared to warrant criminal investigation.

It isn’t clear if the RCMP were informed by Tk’emlups te Swepemc on May 26 that they were planning a press release for the following day and the RCMP appear to have been excluded from seeing the press statement in advance. If the RCMP had had prior knowledge of the planned press release, it is likely that they would have discouraged Chief Casimir from stating: “… the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students at Kamloops Indian Residential School.” The RCMP were never presented with any evidence that would constitute a confirmation of 215 children`s remains being found.

Nevertheless, after Tk’emlups’ sensational May 27 announcement, the RCMP continued to have meetings with Tk’emlups and to interview persons involved with the alleged discovery. The RCMP contacted Dr. Sarah Beaulieu shortly after May 27 and probably sought to understand what Beaulieu told the band and what might make anyone think the soil disturbances could be clandestine burials. This contact evidently tripped some alarms, most notably for Talaga who was now in Kamloops.

Talaga recalls her editor apologetically informing her that: “The Prime Minister’s Office, the RCMP, is questioning the numbers – the 215.” Surprisingly, given that Talaga was privy to what was – and wasn’t – on the ground at KIRS at the time, Talaga assured her editor, “The number was correct.”

In The Knowing, Talaga claims (Pp. 32-3) to have phoned the late Murray Sinclair who then tells the Standing Committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs on June 3: 

“We need to have a discussion with the police about how they’re handling it, because they should not be pursuing those who are revealing the information. They should, in fact, be looking at and looking for those records. They should be looking at what we know as opposed to trying to pursue witnesses.The young lady who did the research on the ground-penetrating radar, for example, is quite scared of the approach that the RCMP have taken with her, and I don’t blame her. My advice to her—and others—has been to make sure she has legal counsel available to her so that she is not mistreated going forward.” 

Within days of her May 27 announcement, Chief Casimir informed the public that a written report of Beaulieu’s findings would be made available to all. A written report appears to have been reviewed by 5 archaeologists in 2021 but it remains apocryphal since it hasn’t been made public. It isn’t known if the RCMP were provided with a copy of the written report but if they were, they still didn’t find any grounds to open a criminal investigation of the KIRS site.

On June 4, Chief Casimir clarified that a mass grave had not been found: “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.”

The ICC Complaint

The RCMP were evidently unaware that while they were investigating the 215 children’s remains claim, a group of lawyers were preparing a complaint to the ICC that implicated the RCMP in the alleged concealment of children’s deaths. Acting as the coalition’s lead counsel, Brendan Myers Miller LL.M, wrote in a newsletter: “(t)he recent unearthing of amass (sic) unmarked grave of 215 Aboriginal children who were under the forced care of the Government of Canada and the Vatican” warranted involving the ICC to investigate what Canada wasn’t investigating since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) first sought the “truth of these deaths of Aboriginal children in care at residential schools.”

The lawyers made an extraordinary presumption of evidence that would typically suggest the commission of a genocidal act: “As would be the case anywhere in the world, this mass grave, and the deaths and general treatment of those children while in care of the federal government and the Vatican, is evidence of crimes against humanity.”

Except these lawyers knew or should have known that there was no evidence of a mass grave and that even if they supposed 215 GPR detections constituted forensic evidence of homicides, this tacitly meant numerous single graves and not one mass grave.

Because the Rome Statute prohibits prosecuting anyone for acts committed prior to July 1, 2002 and KIRS closed long before that date, the lawyers could not pursue an ICC investigation for genocide. Instead, the lawyers accused Canada, the Vatican, and their agents of committing a crime against humanity by endeavouring to conceal the deaths and mass grave. The ongoing concealment supposedly causes such anguish and harm to the Indigenous community as to constitute a crime against humanity. The ICC complaint was signed by a total of 15 lawyers on June 2, filed the following day and received by the ICC on June 7, 2021. 

In September 2022, the ICC discreetly announced that it had rejected the complaint on the grounds that it did not have jurisdiction. Speaking to the inaugural National Gathering on Unmarked Burials hosted by Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray, former ICC president and judge, Dr. Chile Eboe-Osuji told the audience, “There is no pathway to the International Criminal Court for the situation of the historical Indian residential school system in Canada.”

Dr. Eboe-Osuji, 4th President, International Criminal Court.

The ICC complaint mentions two Tk’emlups members who were interviewed by media on May 28 which would suggest that the complaint was drafted on or after that date. Headlines about a mass grave began circulating on the same day. Either the lawyers read articles such as the one that appeared in the NYT and took it as true or they were told about a mass grave prior to the drafting of the Tk’emlups May 27 press release. That is, the lawyers were told of a mass grave before May 25 when the press statement is presented to a select audience of journalists, if that early version of the press statement did not include any reference to a mass grave. This would mean that the ICC complaint was being drafted soon after Beaulieu notified Tk’emlups of her GPR results and the lawyers were not aware of what would be said – and not said – in the official press statement.

It isn’t clear what led Ian Austen, the author of the NYT article, to conclude that a mass grave had been found. Presumably, whatever basis Austen had for making that statement passed muster with his editor. There was a failure to verify the Tk’emlups claim on the part of many news agencies. However, it is extraordinary for lawyers to positively state the existence of human remains and a mass grave without empirical proof which makes it seems likely that the lawyers had been in contact with someone involved with Tk’emlups prior to May 25 who told them that a mass grave of children had been found at KIRS because few people were aware of what Beaulieu’s GPR survey had found, which had only been reported to Tk’emlups on May 24. 

The lawyers didn’t wait for verification of either the existence of any mass grave or children’s remains and their suspicion that more mass graves were likely to be found suggests prejudice on their part. As Miller mentions in his newsletter, the belief of missing children in unmarked burials at former Indian Residential Schools was a carry-over from the TRC. Believing a mass grave exists bolsters the wish to indict Canada on genocide. 

Meme found on Facebook.

Assuming that any competent lawyer would be wary of perjuring themselves, the lawyers were apparently convinced that material evidence existed of children remains in a mass grave for them to commit to stating the deaths and mass grave as a fact. If they were erroneously notified of the discovery of human remains in a mass grave at KIRS as early as May 24, they were apparently informed of such in a manner that convinced them that incontrovertible forensic evidence was imminent.

This ICC complaint relied on two elements for it to have had a chance of being investigated by the ICC: the existence of children’s remains and the intent and effort to conceal their supposed mass grave. The fact that Sinclair presented the RCMP’s interview with Beaulieu as persecuting a witness plays into the objective of showing that the RCMP, as agents of the GoC, were attempting to conceal the deaths. Bear in mind that the late Murray Sinclair controverted the TRC’s figure of 3,201 student deaths by suggesting, after May 27, that as many as 15-25,000 or more children could be missing from the residential schools. Sinclair never publicly explained how he arrived at that significantly higher number.

It was the specter of children murdered en masse that kept the ICC complaint alive in ghoulish service to an ulterior agenda. Deferring any excavation of the KIRS site kept the possibility of finding children’s bodies plausible. After the ICC rejects the lawyers’ complaint, continuing to defer any excavations evades exposure of the fraud.

Conclusion

Since the May 27, 2021 announcement, some of the main actors have been playing a double-game of cautioning against jumping to conclusions while at the same time speaking as if firmly landed on a clandestine graveyard.

For instance, during Dr. Beaulieu’s July 15, 2021 presentation where she publicly adjusted the 215 figure to 200, Beaulieu stressed that while the soil disturbances are “probable burials,” they need to treat those sites as probable “until one excavates.” Beaulieu then added, “This is a long process that will take significant time and resources. They were children, robbed of their families and their childhood.” Beaulieu stated that despite knowing that 15 of those probable burials were ruled out by excavations previously undertaken by Simon Fraser University archaeologists who did not find any human remains. The earlier digs provide an archaeological sample indicating the probable absence of any human remains in the disputed site.

“All residential school landscapes are likely to contain burials and missing children and remote sensing such as GPR merely provides some spatial specificity to this truth,” said Beaulieu. Because the RCMP file remains open and Tk’emlups controls Beaulieu’s oral and written reports, we do not know what makes Beaulieu so sure that there are any dead children in the orchard. It isn’t clear if Beaulieu is under a non-disclosure agreement with Tk’emlups but she has since refused to respond to any journalist inquiries. 

If Dr. Carleton says the report of mass graves is false, it’s news to Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray who recently appeared in another Warrior Life Podcast and repeatedly told Palmater’s audience that mass graves of missing children exist all over Canada and that these children need to be identified and returned to their families if possible. A year and half earlier, Murray was telling the Senate Committee on Indigenous People: “There are no missing children; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because parents were never told where they’re buried.”

The wish to believe that priests and nuns operated a veritable death camp under the pretenses of a boarding school is an outgrowth of the festering arch cynicism engendered by postmodernism. Deferential to the point of contempt, the federal government has let Tk’emlups carry on as Tk’emlups sees fit. This led to the passing of a motion to declare that Indian Residential Schools were a genocide and the same author of that motion, Leah Gazan (NDP MP Winnipeg-Centre), now wants to outlaw even asking if it really was a genocide. September 30th became a federal statutory holiday in 2021 (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation) and is becoming a statutory holiday for many provinces.

NDP MP Leah Gazan (Credits: Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press).

Tk’emlups received $8,000,000 of the $321M the Trudeau government promised for First Nations to conduct searches for bodies. Nowhere have any mystery bodies been found and it is very unlikely that any will be found because there aren’t any missing children as the Special Interlocutor told the Senate Committee. This morbid pantomime of recrimination and indignation shows no sign of ending any time soon although there is an increasingly skeptical public

Chief Casimir now refers to the 215 children’s remains as “anomalies” which is all they ever were in reality and she’s still not committing to any excavation to determine what the anomalies are one way or another. It is very likely that the anomalies are remnants of a septic field built on the site in 1924. Canadians continue to be held hostage to a blood libel of ghastly genocide because no one in authority dares infringe upon the sanctimony of First Nations victimhood no matter how incredible or false it gets.

Perhaps there were actors in the initial days that really believed that they had found scores of murdered children in an old apple orchard but when Chief Casimir presents her AFN resolution in early July 2021, she knows that no dead children were found there, much less a mass grave. The accusations that Casimir makes in her AFN motion echo the same accusations that the 15 lawyers make in their ICC complaint and it would seem that, at this point, preserving the chances of the ICC complaint is driving Casimir’s actions. The lawyers’ ICC complaint didn’t receive much press coverage when it was filed and negligible coverage when the ICC rejected it.

The moment when Casimir presents her AFN motion and states that a mass grave has been found is when the 215 children’s remains claim becomes a hoax. Whether the lawyers are victims of the con or co-perpetrators remains to be determined but the lawyers should have known better than to presume the evidence existed before knowing it to exist. 

The RCMP file remains open because they can’t rule out the possibility of bodies being found until thorough excavations are conducted. A terrible wave of vandalism, statue toppling and church burning was let loose in the wake of the Tk’emlups claim and it continues to this day. This was a hoax that became a national myth of negative heritage with children now being regularly schooled in the belief that Canada killed First Nations children. It is a despicable manipulation of innocence and credulity.

So far none of the Members of Parliament who voted unanimously for Gazan’s genocide motion have since recanted their support. Having presumed Canada’s and the churches’ guilt, those same MPs are now being presented with a bill that would stifle what meager appeal could be offered by citizens in the court of public opinion.

The worst of all crimes is receiving the least of due process. In the Senate, Murray asserted, “If the International Criminal Court isn’t going to take steps to hold the state accountable, then absolutely, we need to find another mechanism.” In her recent appearance on Warrior Life Podcast and in her several reports as the Special Interlocutor, Murray has stressed that she will be seeking jurisdiction and reparations.

Aiding and abetting Murray’s efforts to find another mechanism to prosecute Canada for residential school genocide, an international tribunal will be coming to Canada in 2026 at the request of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. “Asking them whether Canada committed crimes against humanity and genocide and getting their answers I think is going to be very important to survivors and and communities because they’ve been talking about how there’s been no justice and no accountability,” said Murray.

Credit: Warrior Life Podcast.

As the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burials Associated with Indian Residential Schools, Kimberly Murray recently released her Final Report. In addition to an Indigenous-led Repartaions Framework for “genocide, crimes against humanity, and mass human rights violations,” Murray lists 42 obligations that Canada must fulfill to address the “historical and ongoing genocide.” Murray also calls for the federal government to create an Indigenous-led national commission with a 20-year mandate to investigate missing and disappeared children while at the same time insisting that Canada refer itself to the ICC for investigation into crimes against humanity.

A direct beneficiary of the 215 children’s remains claim, Murray is singular in the amount of opportunities she envisions being further mined from abandoned and apocryphal residential school graveyards. 

Long before the federal government agrees to pay reparations for phantom deaths at former Indian Residential Schools, it should convene a Royal Commission to establish who knew what and when about the alleged discovery of 215 children’s remains. Were the lawyers who complained to the ICC simply taken in by someone else’s rash and premature conclusions about what GPR had detected? Were the lawyers succumbing to confirmation bias? Or, were they like Murray, hoping to exploit fake news for personal and professional enrichment?

Written by

• Michael Melanson

Michael Melanson is a skilled tradesman and writer living in Winnipeg.

NDP MP Leah Gazan (credits: Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press).

September 27, 2024

As a constituent of Winnipeg-Centre, I am writing to express my disagreement and dissatisfaction with your introduction yesterday of a Private Member’s Bill (C-413) to amend the Criminal Code “to create an offence of willfully promoting hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada through statements communicated other than in private conversation.”

Like your motion to have Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) declared a genocide, this bill is an effort you have conceived of without any apparent attempt to canvass your constituents for either their approval or any concerns we might have about your proposed bill. As one of your constituents, I am not satisfied that you are truly representing the wishes of your constituency.

Speaking about your bill, you said: "The residential school system was a genocide designed to wipe out Indigenous cultures, languages, families and heritage. To downplay, deny or justify it is cruel, harmful and hateful."

The residential school system was deemed a genocide by characterization, not by trial. Technically, the Rome Statute rules out any prosecution for events prior to July 1, 2002. This means that the case of IRS genocide can only be tried in the court of public opinion which you are now trying to proscribe by criminalizing any public discourse on the question of whether or not the IRS constitutes genocide by international legal standards.

Will it soon be criminal for me to ask what evidence you have to prove the IRS was designed with genocidal intent? Will it become illegal to point out that there are examples where the schools helped preserve Indigenous cultures and languages?

Will Tomson Highway, for one, become a criminal for having written a memoir that looks back fondly on his years at residential school?

Tk’emlups First Nation recently corrected its May 27, 2021 claim of 215 children remains being found to just being “anomalies.” Will they soon be guilty of downplaying the harms of residential schools?

While C-413 may well be juridically useless since no one can be convicted of ‘denialism’ if “the statements were relevant to any subject of public interest, the discussion of which was for the public benefit, and if on reasonable grounds they believed them to be true,” the effect of passing this bill will be a profound chill well beyond what now exists socially.

Since the claim of an IRS genocide was validated by the passing of your genocide motion, many people, often Indigenous, have confabulated on the genocide trope. Some people now believe it to be true that: “Anytime a child became pregnant by a priest, the baby was thrown into the crematorium to burn ALIVE,” (actual comment found on Facebook; emphasis in the original).

Will socially corrosive atrocity propaganda like that soon have the hammer of criminal sanctions to smite anyone expressing disbelief at such claims outside of themselves?

If the intent of such law is to spare IRS survivors further harm, what unnecessary anguish do they suffer and will suffer the more these lurid tales of residential school horror spread without due contention? For that matter, is characterizing former IRS students as ‘survivors’ fair to those many students who, like Tomson Highway, thrived because of that education? Will former students have to question their own experiences or silence themselves in dread of opposing the populist mob that demands only one assessment of residential schools as tantamount to a death camp? How is that not cruel or harmful and will I become an outlaw for even asking?

C-413 is a noxious affront to reason and reconciliation if Canadians cannot freely determine the truth of residential school history and must accept, under threat of criminal prosecution, an utterly degrading characterization of Canada and its history. I urge you to withdraw your bill.

SCO Grand Chief Jerry Daniels (Credits: Gary Solilak/CBC).

The Southern Chiefs Organization and four Anishinaabe activists have registered a statement of claim against the Government of Manitoba and Manitoba Hydro to block the renewal of licensing for Lake Winnipeg Regulation (LWR) which permits MB Hydro to regulate water levels for the purpose of hydroelectricity generation. The Plaintiffs are arguing that Lake Winnipeg should be recognized as a person in law and granted rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

To bolster their claim, the Plaintiffs have anthropomorphized the lake in their tribal idiom:

“Weeniibiikiisagaygun (Lake Winnipeg) has a spirit, is sacred and is living. First Nations Knowledge Keepers, land users and rights holders tell us that Lake Winnipeg is suffering and she is sick… It is our responsibility to speak on behalf of Lake Winnipeg as she is unable to speak for herself. Her well-being is crucial to the health of current and future generations,” Mary Maytwayashing (plaintiff).

Weeniibiikiisagaygun is Anishinaabemowin but ‘Winnipeg’ is actually derived from the Cree, Win-nipi (‘dirty water’). 

“Weeniibiikiisagaygun’s voice has never been heard by Manitoba and Manitoba Hydro. It is our responsibility to support and stand up for her,” Robert Maytwayashing.

The Plaintiffs assign gender to the lake but on what basis? How do they or anyone know what is the lake’s gender and how can anyone else confirm that the lake wishes to be designated as female?

“Weeniibiikiisagaygun is our greatest teacher. We are part of her, and she is part of us. We must listen to her as she carries a spirit and teachings,” Taylor Galvin (Plaintiff).

The Plaintiffs imply the lake has sentience if it can teach. How the lake imparts teachings without speaking is not explained and the implication is that the Plaintiffs receive esoteric knowledge from the lake through a symbiotic relationship made possible by being Anishinaabe people. This is an argument of Indigenous exceptionalism.

Lake Winnipeg may be Indigenous, so to speak, but is it necessarily Anishinaabe? Since the Anishinaabe are known to have entered this region in the mid-1700s, they are not indigenous to the Lake Winnipeg region. If Lake Winnipeg can’t speak for itself, how can the Plaintiffs demonstrate that the lake has given its consent to the Plaintiffs to speak on its behalf?

In their claim, the Plaintiffs appeal to principles of fundamental justice. If there is no way to impartially verify Lake Winnipeg has given its consent, can the courts decide in favour of the Plaintiffs without fear of inadvertently committing an injustice to a person who is, for all intents and purposes, mute? How can a court determine whether anyone truly speaks for Lake Winnipeg and is not putting words into the lake’s mouth for their own self-interests?

The Plaintiffs have effectively made the lake their ward and appointed themselves as guardians. If the lake is putatively indigenous and the Anishinaabe are not indigenous to the lake’s region, why should the Court tacitly grant the Plaintiffs guardianship? 

As a regionally non-Indigenous group, the Anishinaabe have culturally appropriated the lake and seek to also jurisdictionally appropriate it by claiming there are “sacred Anishinaabe laws” that pertain. Anishinaabe law is considered sacred because it was supposedly set out by “Manito” (the Creator) which is one of many subjective arguments in the claim. But if the Anishinaabe are technically non-Indigenous in this instance, then why should their law, however it may or may not be codified, be privileged in the Courts over provincial non-Indigenous law if the rule of non-Indigenous law is permissible? 

How can it be shown that Lake Winnipeg has spirit? How can the Plaintiffs rightly claim moral and spiritual authority over the lake on the basis of special Indigenous co-relationship when they are simply the first wave of colonists to arrive in Manitoba?.

Given that the Anishinaabe have only been near Lake Winnipeg since the mid-1700s, any sense of duty or cultural importance they derive from proximity to the lake are values they brought to Lake Winnipeg and cannot be values that Lake Winnipeg imparted to them in a way that is substantively different from any other people that subsequently took up residence near the lake, unless one allows for a special racial dispensation as Indigenous people to bond with any geographical location in North America in ways that other humans can’t. 

If “Lake Winnipeg is alive, has a spirit and exists in an interconnected relationship to other entities and living beings,” how does the Plaintiffs’ operation of motor boats and commercial fishing comport with that philosophy? How can that romantic view of the lake as a person be reconciled with operating a motor boat across that person’s back? Should the appeal to Indigenous exceptionalism be extended to allow for practical hypocrisy?

If technology and commerce on the lake is permissible for the few, then why not also MB Hydro’s technology and commerce for the many, which includes the Plaintiffs in their respective residences?

In the case of Manitoba, the Anishinaabe are an earlier colonizing group than the Europeans. The entire concept of individual rights embodied in the Charter exists because of European colonization and the Plaintiffs avail themselves of the civil law made available by that same colonization. By their own admission, the Plaintiffs convey, in language and mediums provided through European colonization, their own use and enjoyment of the material culture made available by that same colonization.

The Courts cannot find in favour of the Plaintiffs without unreasonably discriminating against itself. This statement of claim is ultimately a question of whether contemporary political colonization by narrow special interests should override the commonwealth’s established colonization presently benefiting all provincial residents, including the Plaintiffs.

Pinawa Dam Provincial Heritage Park

Aerial view of Shamattawa, 2020 (credits: Austin Grabish/CBC).

In a recent Winnipeg Free Press column Tom Brodbeck remarks, “Considering the extreme harm colonial governments in Canada have perpetrated against Indigenous people over the past 150 years, one would think this country could at least provide First Nations with clean drinking water.”

Brodbeck is specifically referring to the remote reserve of Shamattawa in northern Manitoba. Shamattawa is one of the most-challenged reserves in Canada and has been notoriously plagued with social pathologies for decades. Only accessible by air or winter road, providing any sort of materials and services is costly and logistically difficult. Yet, as Brodbeck notes: “Economic development is lacking on reserves. In many cases, it is virtually non-existent.” Shamattawa is a case of the latter.

Brodbeck doesn’t make the connection between location, the reserve system and why economic development is negligible. If everything costs more to ship it to Shamattawa, then anything Shamattawa produces from those materials will cost more than similar goods produced elsewhere. The local market is small and population growth outside of residing band members is limited by laws concerning use and occupation of reserve lands and the disposition of the band council, which controls housing and membership. 

Indian reserves exist because they are a feature of Canada’s ancient apartheid, a benevolent segregation of Indians from the settlers to places where the Indigenous people could continue their traditional ways in lands reserved for them. This was conceivable at a time when Canada was sparsely populated nor entirely confederated. The separate status of being ‘Indian’ stems back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Both Canada and the United States have essentially grandfathered in this British jurisprudence. The U.S., however, has no remote reserves like Shamattawa.

Brodbeck decries: “There is no urgency by the federal government to solve the drinking water problem in Shamattawa, only finger pointing about why a faulty water treatment plant installed there still hasn’t been fixed after years of deficiency.”

The deficiency appears to involve the water intake becoming clogged with ice and damaged at various times of the year.

The ‘faulty water treatment plant’ was built between 2021-2022. Upgrades and expansion to the plant seem to have commenced shortly afterwards as well as repairs: “The community completed repairs to their water treatment plant, with support from Indigenous Services Canada. However, the repairs were unsuccessful in addressing the water treatment issues. Additional expansion and upgrades to the water treatment plant and water main distribution are nearing completion. Local and technical issues have delayed the project.” 

The new water treatment plant under construction at Shamattawa (credits: Indigenous Services Canada).

The foregoing announcement was dated Aug. 2, 2024. Brodbeck complains about things not being fixed but omits that the ISC is trying to correct the deficiencies. Shamattawa First Nation filed a class action suit awgainst the federal government which has since been joined by 59 other reserves. The bands are seeking “compensation and a court order that the federal government provide safe drinking water and proper funding for water systems on reserve.”

“You have 59 communities with literally thousands of people waiting to get after Canada to be accountable for the service they have to deliver,” explained Shamattawa’s Chief, Jordna Hill. “They say the federal government is responsible for Indians and Indian land, everything in there, and as far as that matters Canada is not doing their job if they have to be in court.”

Like many chiefs and activists, Brodbeck regards First Nations as nations when it suits his rhetorical purposes but in practical reality, First Nations are pitiable wards of the Crown. If First Nations do not have a literal right to clean water, they at least deserve it because of all the harms that Canada has inflicted upon them since Confederation.

“First Nations, such as Shamattawa located in northern Manitoba, are forced to suffer with unclean water, causing people to get sick and in some cases develop rashes. The lack of clean drinking water weighs heavily on the mental health of that community and makes it extremely difficult to lead productive lives.”

Then comes feeling sorry for an inherently generous people whose beneficence was rewarded with federal perfidy by an invading power. 

“In many ways, Canada has made little progress in fulfilling its obligations under the numbered treaties negotiated mostly in the late 1800s. Those nation-to-nation agreements spell out how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are to live together in peaceful co-existence and mutual respect, while sharing the fruits of the land First Nations have lived on for thousands of years.”

Brodbeck provides a good example of how someone can internally reconcile the view of Shamattawa as a virtual sovereign autonomy with the remote reserve’s utter dependence on Canada to exist. Where actual documents and facts fail his rhetoric, Brodbeck resorts to clubbing readers with rote pity.

“Instead, colonial governments and settlers have benefited from the rich resources of the land, while displacing and marginalizing Indigenous people and disrupting their way of living. Worse, colonial governments have attempted to eradicate Indigenous people through coercive assimilative policies over the past 150 years — policies governments today say they regret and for which they have apologized.”

Assimilation isn’t eradication; assimilating someone presupposes their continued existence. Brodbeck is regurgitating one of the oldest talking points of Indigenous exceptionalism: assimilation was an unequivocally harmful and evil thing that was imposed on Indigenous people. Assimilation is vilified without nuance or qualification because the central foundation of aboriginal special interest rhetoric is cultural distinctiveness. Drawing no distinctions between cultural and civil assimilation, activists and advocates like Brodbeck, project a value of lethal toxicity for assimilation when it involves Indigenous people: that their physical, mental and social well-being is inextricably relative to the degree to which they retain and practice their traditional culture.

Since these are victimhood narratives designed for mass consumption, the dynamic and aggregate nature of culture isn’t considered and often the advocates repeating these narratives have only skimmed the actual history with bias. For instance, does the use of English necessarily infect the Indigenous user with non-indigenous culture? Could the intake of non-indigenous culture have been avoided once Indigenous families brought radios, TVs and the Internet into their homes? Was it coercive assimilation on the part of Indigenous parents to subject their children to the CBC?

If by coercive assimilation, Brodbeck means Indian Residential Schools, it should be kept in mind that, in their day, the schools were seen as a progressive response to what was an obvious problem with the reserve system back then: they were not economically sustainable in the long run. There was no welfare state and an ethos of ‘teaching the man to fish’ generally prevailed. Consequently this meant providing Indian children with a practical education. There was never an overriding policy of erasing traditional culture and in most cases, parents enrolled their children in these schools according to their own religious denomination. If a parent adopts a Christian faith, are they choosing to assimilate and if assimilation has redeeming value enough for it to be individually chosen, is there a justification for a policy of collective assimilation?

To this writer’s vintage, it is almost unthinkable to imagine liberals making the case for segregation, but this is an exception many are now willing to make for aboriginal people. If assimilation is absolutely off the table, regardless of how impractical or impossible that is, does it necessarily make a case for segregation in one form or another, whether it be parallelism or sovereign autonomy? What other options are there once assimilation isn’t one?

Like many activists and advocates, Brodbeck justifies his low expectations of First Nations by dignifying their pretenses of nationhood and validating their narratives of victimhood. At least since the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, there has been a garbled notion of regarding ‘First Nations’ as a literal proposition. Sensitivities have been elevated to the level of international dignitaries while social realities on reserve have increasingly reflected the long-understood futility of the reserve system.

Consequently activists and advocates end up speaking out of both sides of their mouths: First Nations are nations like Canada but Canada needs to support them like they are wards of the Crown. As Chief Hill complains: “We are here to ask for equality the way people in Winnipeg and other cities have drinking water. We want the same.” It’s a disingenuous take on equality because Chief Hill doesn’t want Shamattawa to be a municipality like Winnipeg, doesn’t want Shamattawa to have fee simple land like Winnipeg and doesn’t want Shamattawa to fund its own infrastructure through taxing residents like Winnipeg does. Winnipeg doesn’t consider itself a nation on par with Canada; it realizes its position in the context of federal and provincial jurisdiction.

Moans the chorus: “The lack of clean drinking water on reserves is just one of many examples of how First Nations are not afforded the same rights as non-Indigenous people. First Nations do not have access to the same level of health care, education and child welfare services as non-Indigenous communities.”

The Constitution stipulates that First Nations have different rights than non-indigenous people. The reality is that First Nations do have the same rights plus other rights as status Indians and Aboriginal people. The regime of different rights was recognized as a problem half a century ago: “This road, because it is a separate road, cannot lead to full participation, to full equality in practice as well as in theory.”

Written at a time when deficit spending was still abnormal in Canada, the 1969 White Paper recognized the structural deficiencies of treating Indian people as a race apart: 

“Canadians, Indians and non-Indians alike stand at the crossroads. For Canadian society the issue is whether a growing element of the population will become full participants contributing in a positive way to the general well-being or whether, conversely, the present social and economic gap will lead to the increasing frustration and isolation, a threat to the general well-being of society. For many Indian people, one road does exist, the only road that has existed since Confederation and before, the road of different status, a road which has led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration.”

Faced with the mounting human toll of insisting aboriginal people continue down the road of different status, activists and advocates like Brodbeck bluntly appeal to 

maudlin social justice acolytes. However much everything else about living on Shamattawa might make residents become suicidal, surely they should be able to safely drink from their kitchen taps? The fixation on clean water becomes a symbolic gesture to compensate for the substantive failure of continuing the “special treatment by government and society … (that) has been the rule since Europeans first settled in Canada.”

The irony of Brodbeck et al inveighing against the harms of colonialism is that they are actually perpetuating its oldest policy of benign segregation. No amount of money will alter the basic reality of remote reserves like Shamattawa: it exists simply to sequester aboriginal people in a wilderness setting. 

A March 2023 fire that destroyed several housing units on Shamattawa. Lacking fire fighting equipment that was awaiting repair in Winnipeg at the time, all the community could do was watch and let the fire extinguish itself. (Credits: Jordna Hill).

On March 13, 2023, Shamattawa declared a state of emergency due to a spate of suicides and a massive fire. A few days earlier, another remote reserve declared a state of emergency because of recent suicides. At the time, the late Grand Chief of Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Cathy Merrick, noted that this was the second time that Shamattawa had declared a state of emergency because of suicides.

"It seems so normal to hear that now, and it shouldn't be," Merrick said. "Hopelessness has taken our people to a place where they don't need to be, and that hopelessness results from the lack of adequate services."

In 1969, the Liberal party in government stated: “No Canadian should be excluded from participation in community life, and none should expect to withdraw and still enjoy the benefits that flow to those who participate.”

What has changed since 1969 is exemplified by Brodbeck. Rendered victims of history, status Indians are excused from participating and all that remains is justifying the bigotry of low expectations with formulations such as ‘intergenerational trauma’.

So goes ‘the honour of the Crown.’

Tina Fontaine (credits: Globalnews.ca).

The tenth anniversary of Tina Fontaine’s death was marked this past August in Winnipeg. Tina was 15 at the time of her death and a ward of Child and Family Services. By all accounts, she led a troubled life and had been in Winnipeg to visit her biological mother. Tina’s body was discovered in the Red River in August of 2014. Weighted down with rocks and wrapped in a duvet, the attempt to conceal her death was regarded as evidence of homicide although no cause of death was ever determined (which led to the acquittal of Raymond Cormier on the charge of murder).

Manitoba Minister of Housing, Addictions and Homelessness Bernadette Smith remarked: “The national inquiry wouldn't have happened without her.” Perhaps Smith wouldn’t be where she is now without Tina. Smith established the Drag The Red organization in response to Tina’s death which periodically trawls the river for corpses (they have never found any). By establishing her activist profile, Smith won the NDP seat for Point Douglas

In his column on the subject, Niigaan Sinclair gushed, “I owe Tina Fontaine more than any words, or column, could say.” Recollecting the vigil for Tina on Aug. 19, 2014, Sinclair remarked, “Many people shed tears and took with them a love for someone who has given all of us more than she ever received.”

What it meant for Sinclair was a job writing columns for the Winnipeg Free Press. 

“One thing is definitely true: when history books are written, Tina will be recorded as one of the most important contributors to change in this community’s — and, indeed, Canada’s — path,” declared Sinclair.

In exposing “the horrendous experiences of Indigenous children, particularly young girls, in the child-welfare system,” Tina’s death led to the creation of numerous Indigenous organizations, such as Drag The Red, and “overhauls” to existing organizations such as Siloam Mission.

Boat donated to Drag The Red from Unifor (credits: Unifor.org).

“Tina’s experiences,” writes Sinclair, “Showed how the foundation of Manitoba’s child-welfare system is callous and ignorant of the impacts of residential schools and poverty on Indigenous communities.” Of course, Manitoba’s child welfare system wasn’t founded on an understanding of the impacts of residential schools; the negative characterization of the schools is recent. By conflating Tina’s death with the schools, Sinclair is parlaying Fontaine’s death into a greater pattern of state harm inflicted on Indigenous people. Tina’s death became emblematic of collective Indigenous historical grievances. Small wonder then, perhaps, that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women Inquiry that arose from Tina’s death ultimately determined there was an “ongoing genocide.” General indictments against the state were extrapolated from specific incidents by specious association.

“It wasn’t only the child-welfare system that failed Tina,” noted Sinclair. Tina needed an “array of services from child and family, education, victim support, law enforcement, health, and mental health systems.” Millions of dollars have since gone into creating and providing those services and millions more are pending. 

A great number of people have been professionally enriched by Tina's death including Premier Wab Kinew “who credits what happened to Tina Fontaine as motivating him to enter politics.” 

Numerous government agencies have been blamed for contributing to her tragic demise. Sinclair obliquely refers to Tina’s “experiences of mistreatment, neglect and violence” but doesn’t elaborate. However, according to Elroy Fontaine (Tina’s sibling), her and Tina’s mother, Valentina May Duck, is “responsible for the death of my sister Tina Fontaine.”

Elroy Fontaine (credits: CBC.ca).

“Valentina Exploited my sister when she came to visit her and that was the reason why my sister Tina and Valentina got into an argument and how she ended up being kicked out to the streets, it was because Valentina had Exploited my sister and that is how she got into contact with Raymond Cormier and other men. Valentina is the reason my sister is not here anymore,” Elroy Fontaine wrote in a social media post.

Elroy goes on to describe his own personal experiences with Duck which should be taken with caution as there isn’t corroboration. Elroy tells of being used by Duck as “just a sexual object that she can pass around and get money from.” Elroy says this human trafficking began when he was 3 years-old. “Growing up I was never in Valentina’s care, but every chance she got she would Exploit me to many other men. I was always forced to go on these family visits from CFS.”

Rather than some hereditary curse from distended residential school attendance, does Tina’s demise owe more to abuses she may have suffered from her mother? 

If Tina’s death was “the galvanization of people,” exploiting dead Indigenous women for activist career goals has become a grim routine. Besides the professional activists who derive gainful employment “providing on-the-ground support to families of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people,” there are the fractious grassroots activists who hold street marches with every new Indigenous female corpse found, so long as the cause of death isn’t due to another Indigenous person.

Within days of a bridge being blocked in protest about a woman being struck by a vehicle while laying down in the road, there was a blocking of Winnipeg’s largest intersection over another woman accidentally killed in a collision with a police vehicle. Many of the people participating in both protests are regulars at the two Search-the-Landfill camps set up to protest for locating the remains of women murdered by a white serial killer.

Sinclair mentions the cases of Leah Anderson and Kendara Ballantyne but both of those cases remain unsolved. He doesn’t mention Serena McKay, Cynthia French or Amanda Clearwater whose killers are known to be Indigenous. Statistics show that in 86% of Indigenous female homicides, the killers were also Indigenous and most often also a domestic partner. It is shamefully conspicuous which victims receive vigils and rallies and which victims do not.

The ghouls are selective and feast on the dead women that are the most lucrative in terms of fetching funding for their respective offices or most useful for their ideological purposes.

MLAs Bernadette Smith (left) and Nahanni Fontaine (credits: Justin Fraser/CBC). Note the photos of dead Indigenous women on the mantel behind them.

Manitoba Minister of Families Nahanni Fontaine (no relation) reflected: "Tina Fontaine's legacy literally has saved lives.That little girl has saved lives from coast to coast to coast, and it's also indicative of how powerful Indigenous women are, even in death."

For Tina and the others, was it only their deaths that gave them power? Like Nahanni Fontaine, many people were empowered - and personally enriched - by those deaths and by Tina’s death most of all.

“Heart-centered” Archaeology: Is it advocacy more than archaeology?

Kisha Supernant (credit: Globe & Mail).

In An Indigenous Archaeologist’s Journey to Find the Lost Children, Kisha Supernant writes: “In mid-2021 Tk̓emlúpste Secwépemc Nation (sic) announced that about 200 probable graves had been detected near the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.” The actual headline was: “First Nation in Kamloops, B.C., confirms bodies of 215 children buried at former residential school site.”  

Weeks after their initial announcement, Tk’emlups te Secwépemc corrected the tally to 200 and recently referred to those discovered remains as “anomalies” while returning to the 215 figure because “it stands for the countless spirits of children who never had the chance to return home from residential schools all across Canada,” (emphasis added).

The story of a surreptitious genocide committed at former residential schools was circulated years earlier by notorious conspiracy theorist, Kevin Annett. Annett interviewed former students who said they witnessed homicides and clandestine burials at the schools.

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) found no credible evidence of a single homicide committed against any student by any staff. After May 2021 however, stories multiplied from former students about knowing where missing children were buried. Nonetheless, at every site where excavations have been conducted after ‘anomalies’ were detected that corroborated oral testimonies, no remains have been found.

Archival research beforehand would have cautioned against suspicions of multiple clandestine burials. There are no historic reports from any parents reporting their children missing from the schools.

Supernant claims, “Thousands of them died at schools from neglect, substandard living conditions, diseases, malnutrition and abuse. Some were buried in cemeteries or graveyards at the schools, while others were disposed of in more clandestine ways. Parents were often not notified of their children’s death; their kids simply never came home.”

What proof does Supernant have that any deceased student was disposed of in a clandestine manner? What proof can she have when no such burials have been found? 

According to Jacques Rouillard, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Montreal, there are about 2,000 students who perished while registered at a residential school (primarily from tuberculosis and influenza). The TRC's report states that the vast majority of the students who attended residential schools died in a hospital, in school infirmaries or at their home and were buried in the cemetery of their community. A few students were buried in a cemetery close to a residential school because they were orphans or because of the difficulties associated with returning bodies to remote reserves, especially during winter. In all cases, children were given a Christian burial and efforts would have been made to notify parents as required by Indian Affairs.

Students did not die from malnutrition; it was often the case that students were fed (and clothed) better at the schools than at home. There are no known cases of any student dying from abuse at any of the schools, as the TRC itself noted.

While Supernant insinuates nefarious acts behind unmarked graves, the actual circumstances are explicable. The cemeteries on school grounds or those nearby became abandoned. Wooden markers and occasionally headstones disappeared for one reason or another over the decades making it difficult for descendants to locate the plots of their deceased relatives. As Kimberly Murray, Special Interlocutor appointed by the federal Department of Justice clarified before the Senate Committee on Indigenous People: “There aren’t any missing children; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried.” 

Kamloops Indian Residential School c.1937.

Supernant repeats a popular misconception: “Established in the 1880s, these institutions incarcerated Indigenous children—separating them from their families and forcing them to attend, indoctrinating them into Christianity.”

Attendance was made compulsory after 1920 and only then if there were no other schools available. Roughly a third of eligible children attended a residential school, another third went to day schools and a third never attended school. Since the schools were church-run, parents enrolled their children according to their respective denominations which indicates that they were already Christians.

Supernant identifies as Indigenous and personalizes the “trauma inflicted by residential schools” by mentioning she had a great-grandmother who attended one.  Although her non-Indigenous ancestors implicitly outnumber the Indigenous ones, Supernant feels justified in presenting herself as an Indigenous person. Supernant realizes the advantages of being counted among the subjects of study; it gives her the “right” to study Indigenous people. Her “heart-centered” archaeology is validated by her ancestry while also being her self-validation: “It is also in heart-centered archaeology that I can find a space to be both an archaeologist and an Indigenous person. It has taken me a lifetime, but I am finally here, practicing archaeology in my own way that respects my Métis relatives.”

In attempting to draw authority from her nominal Métis background and derive social license by identifying with historic victimhood, Supernant inadvertently adds to that victimhood. 

Supernant recounts a survey on a field behind a former residential school: “Back in the lab, the data had resolved into a few colorful oval shapes on a white background, each about three feet long, three feet deep and similarly oriented. These were most likely buried children. No trace of their graves remained visible on the grassy field behind the residential school building, whose shadowed windows hid many secrets still to be discovered.”

Unexcavated radar detections quickly become dead and probably murdered children laying in obliterated graves while the guilty party symbolically lurks nearby awaiting justice. Were it only Supernant convincing herself that the horror stories are true but she was speaking to a survivor: “I told the survivor what the team had found. They needed to step away; the grief and pain were overwhelming… Each of these shapes represented a cherished child.”

Supernant introduces her confirmation bias at the beginning of her article: “A disruption appeared, changing the radar image on the screen. My breath caught. ‘There,’ I thought, anticipating what might come to light when we took the data back to the lab. I will never get used to walking over the land that may hold the unmarked graves of Indigenous children.”

Supernant isn’t asking what else might cause radar ‘disruptions’ and she isn’t telling others what else might account for them. She chooses to believe the worst and she leads others to believe the worst; that is the price they have to pay for her advocacy.

Chris Farley as ‘Matt Foley’ (SNL).

Perhaps the most memorable character of the late comedian, Chris Farley, was Matt Foley who lived “in a van down by the river.” In Winnipeg, where two rivers formed a nexus of settlement, there are few points where anyone could actually park a van down by the river and live in it. What is easy to do, and therefore often done, is pitch a tent along the riverbanks.

In recent years, riverbank encampments have multiplied. I’m not sure how many continue through our winters but in the warmer months, more camps than I am aware of blossom in a vibrant display of intoxicated improvisation. Besides the nylon rainbow of tents that originate from sources unknown, there are usually colourful augmentations with tarps, blankets, bed sheets and whatever. Ubiquitously surrounding all that are the hedges of detritus and loot typical of lives given over to dereliction for the sake of feeding an assortment of addictions. What goes into their veins is more important than what goes over their heads at night.

The Glengarry Park encampment (CBC).

There is a socialist romanticization of these encampments and the people who occupy them as pitiable souls. Surely, most, if not all, are there because some trauma in their past steered them towards a feral fate down by the river. However, unlike the Great Depression where economic misfortune reduced many to live rough in temporary shelters, today’s riverbank dwellers are there when the welfare state has been historically maximal and getting larger year after year.

The paradox for society is that supporting an increasingly ballooning welfare state requires an increasing burden on taxpayers. While some people choose to drop out of society, others choose to be a part of it and contribute to the greater good. It is entirely possible and has been for many decades for someone to choose to never work and live ‘on the dole’, as the Brits would know it. If a young adult finds themselves on the margins of employability, they must deliberate on whether to take whatever work they can find to earn enough to at least put a roof over their head, or to surrender to the not inconsiderable mercies of the Nanny State with its legions of paid and voluntary workers who will even deliver those mercies to their tent door.

The more the working population is taxed to support the growing homeless population (which seems to correspond to the appearance of CERB), the more the minimum and low wage earners have to ask themselves if it’s worth the effort to stay on the paying side. I suspect most of the people who end up down by the river might have made early choices of career unemployment.

A friend of mine once told me that a person needs to support their own vices which implicitly means restraining oneself to the vices they can afford. Thanks to the ingenious enterprise of the black market, powerful narcotics have become cheaper and cheaper. Even so, the demands of such habits bankrupts the individual whether they work or collect social assistance and subsequently they end up in encampments down by the river which may not be as bad as it sounds.

I was surprised to learn that there was an encampment alongside the Red River as far south as the Fort Garry Bridge, a short prowl from the University of Manitoba where so many of today’s social workers acquire certification. (It’s difficult to keep track of just how many riverbank encampments there are and I can only hope someone in City Hall knows). CBC Manitoba reported on how some housed neighbours of the camp “along a well-hidden path in the city's Glengarry Park” are unsettled by the evidently seasonal presence of erstwhile Matt Foleys.

“Some in the area disagree… concerned about unsanitary conditions, noise and evidence of drug use over the years the encampment has been near (their) home.”

After adding the perfunctory acknowledgment that ‘many people experiencing homelessness are dealing with trauma and need to be approached with compassion,’ Councilor Janice Lukes was blunter about the realities of a homeless encampment calling the health risks “astronomical.” Where are people defecating and urinating and considering how many are intravenous drug users, where are their used needles ending up (hepatitis anyone)?

Although CBC interviewed a spokesperson for the encampment who assured the public broadcaster that “residents are all responsible for jobs like cooking and dealing with garbage,” the reporter did not ask just how and where ‘residents’ were disposing of their waste. A quick shot or even a few words from first-hand observation of some sort of improvised camp latrine management would have helped assuage Coun. Lukes’ concerns that the Devil was wiping the hindmost but if there was such at the encampment, the journalist did not say, much less utilize.

Camp spokesperson, Alan Urrutia (Justin Fraser/CBC).

The encampment spokesperson did, however, concede: “Maybe it's a little dirty. Yeah, I'll admit that. But we'll clean that up."

Of course, there are more than a few homeless shelters offering what might seem better lodging than living in a tent down by the river but as the spokesperson explains: "We don't like the homeless shelters… we like the wilderness."

An urban riverbank isn’t ‘the wilderness’ but being Indigenous, the spokesperson probably anticipated that description would play well with the CBC audience who are particularly adept at attaching subtexts of historic calumny when visually cued.

To the homeowners living nearby, however much issues of homelessness beseech the collective social conscience, the encampment has been a civil canker. How do unemployable people support their substance use habits? With theft and/or panhandling at most expense to those in closest proximity.  

At other encampments, residents have stolen property that can be sold off as scrap metal. Copper and aluminum are high-value scrap so wire and bike thefts are common. Because clean copper is worth more, stolen cable is burnt to quickly strip it of its casing. Besides a host of other toxic chemicals, cyanide is released into the air when cables are burned. Bikes are stolen, not just for the convenience of prowling, but often for their aluminum content (usually tire rims and frames) and like cables, bikes are surreptitiously scrapped.

There was a time when City Hall would be keenly sensitive to the quality of life issues affecting ratepayers, but the social justice zeitgeist prevails now and it is more politically advantageous to side with the quality of life issues for the homeless. To her credit, Lukes is saying what her constituents are telling her: the encampment is a nuisance and at least a health hazard: "It's nice that you want to live like this, but you know what? For your own good, it's not healthy, and it's not healthy for society… I think a lot of people in the city feel that way." 

It is illegal to squat on city parks but laws are only as good as the will to enforce them and, well, police are more likely to show up at encampments for wellness checks than to roust anyone. Besides the occasional police visit, campers can expect social service agencies to show up and compete for their patronage.

Regarding this encampment, St. Boniface Street Links showed up to take names and try to connect residents with the shelters and other resources available for the homeless. The Main Street Project arrived while Street Links was still there to inform campers that they had every right to remain where they were and helped guide the campers down the path of inertia with coffee and cookies. Maybe the Main Street Project threw in some clean needles, too, I don’t know, but this encampment was a long way from Main Street.

Charities at cross-purposes frustrate area homeowners who wish “all the social agencies to be on the same page with an appropriate budget.” Perhaps the problem is the sheer number of such agencies all vying for the appropriate budget to address or enable homelessness, as the case may be. What would be the appropriate budget anyway?

Of course, some residents want something to be done to address ‘the root causes of homelessness’ of which the campers are merely the fruit dropping to the ground along riverbanks and empty lots. No one blames the fruit for being the rotten consequence of a rotten tree and who blames the rotten tree for its rotten roots? The roots of homelessness lay elsewhere: it is the wicked cultivators of capitalism and materialism that plant such seeds in the minds of social justice activists who pushed the Overton window on the issue of homelessness so far to the left that no personal responsibility is ever assigned to the campers. 

There’s never been a better time to be a junkie. Besides free needles and maybe soon free drugs, junkies can rely on resuscitation in the event of overdose. I heard of one former Downtown Safety Patrol staffer who remarked on reviving the same person five times on five different occasions with Naloxone. A lot of social justice discussion focuses on providing ‘affordable housing’ which usually doesn’t mean people have to do things that increase their ability to afford better housing for themselves. At the risk of incurring considerable wrath from the various Prefects respectively presiding over their competing fiefdoms, let me say that the hard fact is people living in tents down by the river have the housing that they can afford by choice.

The End Homelessness campaign is faced with the conundrum that, despite all their efforts, homelessness keeps increasing and homeless encampments keep spreading further and further away from the city’s core where dereliction traditionally gravitated. Recent shiny plans for revitalizing downtown Winnipeg feature a predilection for turning Downtown into a social services hub, especially for Indigenous people.  

Even if these non-profit social agencies actually wanted to put themselves out of business by lifting people out of the ‘wilderness’ of homelessness, they would probably never be out of a job because there is that element of the human condition that will always choose the path of least resistance and the contemporary welfare state offers no resistance at all to the choice of dropping out of society. Who wouldn’t want to drop out of a settler colonial society anyway when it is lately responsible for so much intergenerational trauma through genocidal endeavours past and present, not to mention killing the planet in the by and by?

Why feed the colonial beast when it will feed you? And what it does not provide, you can plunder from the chumps with mortgages.

Camp spokesperson relaxing down by the river amongst the heaps of ‘fluid’ property (CBC).

Marie Wilson (credits: Justin Tang/Canadian Press).

In Marie Wilson’s recently published memoir, North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, she explains how the TRC came to the conclusion that Canada and the churches committed cultural genocide via the Indian Residential Schools (IRS).

During one hearing, a residential school ‘survivor’ stated, "This was cultural genocide against my people."

Prior to the TRC, the IRS had been frequently characterized as cultural genocide, if not outright genocide, so it is fair to ask if that former student acquired their opinion after learning of the critical view put forth by academics. Similarly, did Wilson and the other commissioners already have an opinion that the IRS were at least a cultural genocide?

In a CBC article, Wilson says the claim of cultural genocide presented a “legally imposed dilemma” for the TRC. Since the Commission was not granted the judicial authority to determine the criminality of the IRS because the matter had already been settled in the courts through the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, Wilson “recounts how for the sake of the TRC's credibility to survivors the commission couldn't ignore what so many of them called out as a crime.”

"We chose our words really, really carefully, but it was out of respect for the survivors and how they themselves told us what had happened to them," Wilson told CBC Indigenous. “And it was in that context that we used the term cultural genocide."

If the TRC was already conceptualizing former students as ‘survivors’, it is likely that they were predisposed towards contextualizing their experience in terms of surviving a genocide. The Holocaust lexicon was appropriated in envy of its moral and political potency.

Although the CBC article and Wilson casually interchange ‘culture genocide’ with plain ‘genocide’, the two terms are distinct in material and judicial terms. There are no criminal sanctions against cultural genocide, for one, and this usage allowed the TRC to abide by its non-judicial mandate by referring to the IRS as a non-criminal genocide. If cultural genocide isn’t a crime, it means that the TRC and anyone else making that accusation are free to exploit the emotionalism of genocide without having to expose their claims to any legal tests. 

What exactly is ‘cultural genocide’? Even if there was “a conscious Canadian policy of cultural genocide,” (which is a highly contentious proposition), if there is no intent to actually kill anyone, is it genocide? Immediately after the TRC reached its patently equivocal judgment of cultural genocide, there was criticism that the IRS deserved to be regarded as an unqualified and therefore criminal genocide. As we sadly know, the wish to treat the IRS as an actual genocide has become official state policy since the announcement that 215 children’s remains had been found in a Kamloops orchard. Three years later, that certainty of gruesome discovery has been reduced to quibbling about “anomalies” with spooky insinuations by proponents yet half-heartedly impugning nefarious deeds.

Wilson and her fellow Commissioners realized their inability “to draw any new conclusions about broken laws or name any new charges.” Calling the IRS a cultural genocide was their rhetorical workaround those limitations. Even if the TRC had chosen to abrogate their mandate based on moral imperative (as Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray did), for the sake of a full-throated calling out of genocide, that would hardly be the end of their “legally imposed dilemma.” 

Canada is a signatory to the Rome Statute which established a statute of limitations on prosecuting for crimes of genocide prior to July 1, 2002. Technically, there is no way the TRC could have laid any charges for genocide against anyone involved with the IRS even if it had been so empowered. We are left with a populist screed which utterly condemns Canada, several churches and school workers (many of whom are/were Indigenous) of being guilty of the worst of crimes in a manner even more diabolical than the fake train station of Treblinka - priests and nuns exterminating children under the auspices of church-run schools.

Because this is political pantomime playing off of Holocaust themes, Wilson raises the specter of denialism in her moral mission "to make plain that this can never be denied in Canada."

"We cannot say that this did not happen, even though some people try to do that. And we mustn't forget, because we need to continue to learn from that history," Wilson said. 

Did genocide happen, though? Is the Accuser’s word enough to pass judgment? 

Was the Just Society the cruelest of lies?

On May 18, Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops First Nation) announced that it was closing its offices on May 23 in honour of the “findings” from May 27, 2021. On May 27, 2021, Tk̓emlúps announced that it had found 215 children’s remains in an old apple orchard adjacent to the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Three years on, Tk̓emlúps has reduced those children’s remains being found to “the confirmation of 215 anomalies were detected.”

In this context, a confirmed anomaly means a confirmed intent to obfuscate. Tk̓emlúps has never excavated any of these 215 anomalies and now that it is public knowledge that the orchard had been a septic field in 1924, among other things since, there may be a reluctance on Tk̓emlúps’s part to actually excavate any of the anomalies lest the band confirm that the “ground penetrating radar specialist” had mistaken septic tiles for Indigenous children. 

Shortly after the May 27, 2021 announcement, Sarah Beaulieu, the GPR specialist, had to make a public correction that the number of anomalies was actually 200 because she subsequently learned that another archaeological team had previously conducted excavations on that site. Undeterred by Beaulieu’s correction, Tk̓emlúps clung to the ‘215’ number because, more than just a symbol of the children lost at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the number came to represent “the countless spirits of children who never had the chance to return home from residential schools all across Canada.”

‘Countless spirits’ is weasel talk to divert people from wondering if there actually are 200/215 missing and murdered children clandestinely buried in an orchard and get them instead to be carried away on a gust of dumb pity. They are countless because Tk̓emlúps doesn’t want anyone to count: actual numbers are a factual commitment. And ‘spirits’ is a vague collective that they don’t have to individually identify and therefore answer hard questions about missing child reports and concerned parents. To date, Tk̓emlúps hasn’t presented a single name for any of the anomalies.

After Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray told the Senate Committee on Indigenous People last year that “the children aren’t  missing,” Tk̓emlúps and the rest of the Gravers have had to awkwardly pirouette around the fact that there is no reason to believe that there are any missing and murdered children at any former residential schools. The phrase, ‘unmarked burials’, which is part of Murray’s auspicious title appears to have been dropped entirely out of the Gravers’ lexicon for the obvious reason that if, as Murray told the Senate, there are no missing children because  “they’re buried in the cemeteries,” there are no unmarked burials.

Coincidentally, Murray’s final National Gathering On Unmarked Burials scheduled for June 11-13, 2024, was indefinitely postponed for unspecified reasons.

The problem for the Gravers is that May 27, 2024 is around the corner and there is no evidence whatsoever of any suspicious deaths at Kamloops IRS. None of the few excavations that have been conducted elsewhere have yielded any bodies either, no matter how certain were the respective Knowledge Keepers. However, the Gravers have convinced a lot of people, too easily by half, that finally after all the years of saying the schools were a genocide, there was actual evidence of mass murders committed by priests and nuns all across Canada. Many First Nations people became heavily invested emotionally in the belief that children’s remains had been found. Who wants to tell them that the supposed children in the orchard are actually septic tiles?

Certainly not the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), who issued the following statement on social media about Tk̓emlúps’s Day of Reflection:

“Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc has designated May 23 as a Day of Reflection in honour of the unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School announced on May 27, 2021. This is a stark reminder faced by First Nations people, and a dark chapter in our shared history. We stand in solidarity with all communities impacted by the recoveries of our little ones and commit to seeking justice and healing to ensure these lives are remembered.”

What recoveries? This writer is not aware of any recoveries of any human remains, little or otherwise, at any former residential school. More than likely, the AFN knows there probably aren’t any bodies at the Kamloops . Nor was the Kamloops orchard claim ever about unmarked graves, which are simply formerly marked graves that have since become unmarked such as is the case with the Brandon IRS graves now situated on Turtle Crossing Campground. AFN seems to be avoiding saying ‘unmarked burials’ while doing their best to string First Nations people along into reacting as if there are missing and murdered children. It is emotionally manipulative and psychologically abusive towards First Nations people. Who can remember lives that can’t be named because they never existed? It’s not as if people don’t have sorrows enough in the here and now.

If the AFN has any material proof of any recoveries of “little ones,” they should make it public. If they don’t, they should immediately recant and apologize to the public and most of all to First Nations people. The Prime Minister should then apologize to all of us for ransacking Canada’s dignity on a half-baked blood libel that could have been disproven with a $40 shovel and some elbow grease. Instead, Tk̓emlúps has received their $8M of the $320M the Trudeau government allocated to the missing and murdered children myth without even having to commit to excavating any of the ‘anomalies’.

Sadly, the Day of Reflection is exceptional from the three years of misinformation since the Kamloops blood libel began only in being a cynical rededication to misleading the public.  

Making Myths Matter: the Ahousaht First Nation and their Missing Children Mystery

Students at Ahousaht Indian Residential School (1904-40).

On April 10, the Ahousaht First Nation (B.C.) held a news conference to release its findings in their search for missing children from two former Indian Residential Schools  on their territory. The Ahousaht Indian Residential School was located on Flores Island and the Christie Indian Residential School was situated on Meares Island until 1971 when it was closed and the students were transferred to Christie Student Residence in Tofino. Notably, the Christie Student Residence was transferred to the West Coast District Council of Indian Chiefs, closing in 1983.

It isn’t clear what makes Ahousaht FN officials believe that there are children missing from either school. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) lists the names of 13 children who died at Ahousaht IRS and 23 who died at Christie IRS. The Ahousaht Residential School Project conducted ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys of several areas: “Likely and potential unmarked grave locations were noted near both Ahousaht Indian Residential School and the Christie Indian Residential School.” The Ahousaht Cemetery was also scanned with GPR and, not surprisingly, there are presumed graves in Ahousaht cemetery.

Slide presented at the Ahousaht news conference.

The reason why there would be presumed graves at a known cemetery is probably an indication that portions of the cemetery may have been neglected or that the grave markers that once existed have disappeared over the decades. Wooden grave markers would not endure in the elements.

Members of the Ahousaht Residential School Project; Manager Anne Atleo speaking.

The Ahousaht band members involved with the search seem to believe that the NCTR lists for deceased students at both schools are incomplete. The band researchers don’t know who is missing and have apparently come to suspect that there are missing children based upon the same erroneous assumptions made by Kamloops First Nation. Unexplained GPR detections are assumed to probably be the unmarked burials of missing children because the rumours of missing children must be based on facts: how else would such rumours originate? Unlike Kamloops FN, the Ahousaht research team “(does) not want to share numbers for potential graves just yet.” 

In amateurish conflation, the researchers found “many inconsistencies between what Survivors know to be true and what is documented in archival material” regarding stories of slugs in milk, worms in oatmeal and maggots in food. Although there are actual menus from the schools extant in the documentary archives, the research team is evidently more inclined to believe the Survivors’ stories than what the documents actually reveal. Discrepancies between documentary evidence and oral testimonies reinforce the horror narrative because anything and everything is suspect on the side of the schools and the Survivors’ memories are regarded as infallible.

This predilection for supposing the documents are false and the Survivors’ stories are true has been a recurring fallacy since the May 27, 2021 Kamloops announcement. Myths of missing and murdered children have been believed as actual events because of the veneration of Survivors in recent years and perhaps also because of the sheer persistence of these ghost stories in the respective communities. It has amounted to a bias seeking confirmation that has played out at every suspected unmarked burial site where excavations have occurred. The searchers are sure they will find bodies but no bodies have ever been found. True to form, some have suspected that the bodies were surreptitiously moved to foil their discovery.

The myth of missing and murdered children has unfortunately been incorporated into the Indigenous identity of victimhood. Since ‘all narrative is compensation for the actual,’ believing that there are missing and murdered children associated with residential schools allows the believers to make sense of present and past negative circumstances in terms of horrible acts committed against them by outside actors - government and churches. It is a way of psychologically distancing themselves from acknowledging the harms caused by members of their own families and communities. The Manager of the Ahousaht Residential School Project, Anne Atleo, plaintively stated at the news conference: “Somebody decided that our parents weren’t going to be good parents. How dare they.”

The story of infested school food could be a similar avoidance mechanism. Saying the food was bad at the schools may be a way of denying how scarce or poor the food was at home. Shaming the schools is a way of dealing with the shame of family homes that provided less than the schools. “We’ve always known what the truth is,” said Atleo.

A slide presented at the news conference.

There are stories of children from Christie IRS being taken up to a mountain or down to a lake and never returning. Former elected Ahousaht chief and former Christie IRS student Greg Louis told CBC that: “Really, up until the Kamloops Nation made the announcement about the Two-fifteen (215 children remains being found), then I really became open about it as a personally (sic) and as a leader. I had no choice but to speak about it.” It isn’t clear from the news coverage but is Louie one of the Survivors who told stories of children missing from the Christie IRS? Did the children go missing from Christie when it was administered by the West Coast District of Indian Chiefs which seems to be when Louie attended?

Greg Louie with CBC Indigenous journalist Jackie McKay. Note the sympathetic body language.

Angus Campbell, an Ahousaht band councilor, told CBC: “We need to investigate some more and clarify and confirm, mostly confirm, that the, uh, it’s either or, you know. We don’t want to not be telling the truth.” The convoluted grammar is indicative of a convoluted process. “Not that we don't believe our people, but we need to confirm it for the rest of the world.” What happens if the believers can’t be believed?

Louie is one of the believers: “Was it my sister? Was it my mom? You know, who didn't make it home?” How could it be his mom? If that logic escapes him, how reliable could his stories be? Unfettered credulity is as much at fault here as undisciplined thinking.

Predictably, “long-term funding and better access to records” is needed to continue this investigative work.

Students at Christie Indian Residential School (1900-83).