Attempts to criminalize the truth about Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRSs) began in earnest in October 2022 when NDP MP Leah Gazan got the House of Commons to unanimously recognize that genocide occurred at residential schools.
Not content with getting that phony motion passed, she took it a step further in February this year by proposing legislation to criminalize attempts to deny that genocide took place at these residential schools despite no evidence that a single IRS child was ever murdered, at least by a staff member, during a 113-year period that saw the enrollment of some 150,000 students in federal government-funded institutions between 1883 and 1996.
Not one murder. Some genocide!
“Denying genocide [the core issue underpinning residential school denialism] is a form of hate speech,” said Gazan, who represents the riding of Winnipeg Centre.
“That kind of speech is violent and re-traumatizes those who attended residential school.”
Always eager to label Canada a genocidal nation, the Office of Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller quickly said he would be interested in reviewing the proposed legislation.
“Residential school denialism attempts to hide the horrors that took place in these institutions,” Miller’s office told CBC News.
“It seeks to deny survivors and their families the truth, and distorts Canadians’ understanding of our shared history.”
The latest episode in this saga occurred on Friday, June 16, when Kimberly Murray, appointed last year as Canada’s “special interlocutor” on missing indigenous children and unmarked graves, released her interim report in which she argued that “urgent consideration” should be given to legal mechanisms to combat residential school denialism.
She referred to such denialism as an “attack” whenever there were announcements of the discovery of possible unmarked graves.
“This violence [sic] is prolific,” the report said. “And takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations.”
Murray doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the term “violent attack.”
Still, she listed several examples, including after the May 2021 announcement by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation that ground-penetrating radar had discovered what are believed to be 215 unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The Kamloops findings — still highly inconclusive today — garnered international media attention and triggered an outpouring of grief, shock and anger from across the country.
Murray said in her report that on top of dealing with an onslaught of media attention, the Kamloops Indian Band in British Columbia had to deal with individuals entering the site itself.
“Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there. Denialists also attacked the community on social media.”
This assertion was made with no independent evidence or proof that the shovel carriers were not themselves concerned Kamloops band members at a site that was enclosed by a chain-link fence soon after the discovery was made.
This is what star investigative journalist Terry Glavin just had to say about these alleged shovel carriers:
There was no report of this to the RCMP. We are not invited to know when this happened or to whom these interlopers explained their wicked intentions or who they might have been, exactly.
We are simply expected to believe it, in the same way, Murray’s report asks us to believe the Tk’emlups’ community initially intended to simply fence off the old apple orchard where a ground-penetrating radar survey detected anomalies that were presumed to be graves, so that certain former residential school students, “the ones that buried the children” in the first place, could come and pay their respects.
What? There are people still alive who were among the students in those lurid stories about children being woken up in the middle of the night to bury their classmates? Who are these people? Can we speak to them? Have they spoken to the police?
A lack of any real evidence did not prevent Murray from stating that Canada has a role to play to combat this denialist sentiment and that “urgent consideration” should be given to what legal tools exist to address the problem, including both civil and criminal sanctions.
“They have the evidence. The photos of burials. The records that prove that kids died. It is on their shoulders,” Murray told a crowd gathered Friday in Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan.
But there is no photographic evidence of IRS children buried beside the shuttered Kamloops IRS nor at any other former IRS school in Canada.
The only photographic evidence I have seen are of regular church burials and of thousands of happy school children. As for the records, they prove that children who died and were buried at the schools (a minority of all children) or those who died and were buried on their home reserves (the vast majority) received a proper Christian burial after succumbing to a contagious disease like tuberculosis over which indigenous people have little natural immunity.
Regardless of this, “The government of Canada and the churches must step up,” Murray said.
Justice Minister David Lametti, who appointed Murray to her role and joined the event in Cowessess First Nation via video conference on Friday, kowtowing like other Liberal hacks to every indigenous whim and fancy regardless of how preposterous they may be, said that he is open to all possibilities to fighting residential-school denialism.
He said that includes “a legal solution and outlawing it,” adding that Canada can look to other countries that have criminalized Holocaust denial.
Looking to other countries is necessary because Holocaust denial is not illegal in Canada. But this Liberal government has little respect for legal niceties, especially when it comes to indigenous demands, so it is likely that IRS denialism will be made a crime while allowing anyone to freely claim the Holocaust is a myth.
Hymie Rubenstein is the editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba.
