On October 26, 2024, the National Post published an article by Conrad Black, “A disgraceful attack on free speech”.
What was disgraceful? Leah Gazan, a Manitoba New Democratic MP introduced a private member’s bill “to make it a crime to question, dispute, minimize or justify the activities of the so-called Indian residential schools which she continues falsely to represent as a genocidal enterprise”.
Why is Conrad Black so fixated on denying the truth about residential schools? The truth is that they were genocidal!
It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of the Department, which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem.
Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs, 1910
The mission of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system was to eradicate the Indigenous population as a distinct population by removing the children from their families and along with their parents stripping them of their language, culture, spiritual traditions – and their territory. And if they died – as up to 50% did in some years – their bodies were never sent home to their grieving parents. 6,500+ survivor testimonies gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission testified to that truth.
It is a documented fact – beyond dispute – that the federal government policy was to not send the bodies of children who died at the residential schools home due to the cost. So the logical question to ask is. “Where are the bodies? Where are they buried?
That is the question that has tormented survivors and their descendants for generations. Even almost 10 years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released their Summary Report, not all levels of governments and churches have released all the residential school records in their possession that would help identify who is missing, where they died and potentially where they are buried.
This is the first step in a long, difficult process – obtaining the records of who died and where and cross listing those against the names of those known to have died and been buried at any one of the 139 residential schools in Canada. The NCTR has roughly 4,400 identified names. The TRC suggests well over 6,000 died. Where are those thousands of missing children? That is the question that needs an answer. Not a denial that it ever happened.
What does Conrad Black say in his article:
“A disgraceful attack on free speech”.
FACT: Not quite as bad as the amendments to the Indian Act that from 1927 – 1951 prohibited Indigenous people from hiring a lawyer or organizing any political organization or kept them from voting in federal elections until 1960. Or Stephen Harper who removed all federal funding to the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada (Cindy Blackstock’s organization) and all funding to child and family services at the Assembly of First Nations within 30 days of their filing a human rights complaint at the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Trying to silence them didn’t work.
There is no doubt that the purpose and intent of them was to assist native children in escaping poverty and illiteracy and giving them a route to a normal and prosperous life.
FACT: The UN Development index in 2016 ranked Canada 12th internationally and the Indigenous population 52nd. What happened?
Nor is there any dispute that can withstand even cursory scrutiny that many of the approximately 150,000 students in those schools did in fact go on to much more successful lives than they might have led without having attended them.
FACT: 7,000+ survivor testimonies disagree. The reality that Black does not want to acknowledge is that the legacy of the Indian Residential School system has been shattered lives, ruined families and seven generations of disenfranchised, marginalized and impoverished Indigenous people cast aside so the colonial settler class could control the country and the land. Period. About that, there can be no doubt. You can’t dismiss the testimony of thousands because a handful of the 150,000 who attended the schools did not experience the horrors in the same way.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission resisted with evident reluctance the rampaging temptation to try to swaddle this macabre fable in the winding sheet of genocide, but it did come to a number of conclusions that were not justified by the large volumes of accompanying documentation and the report has effectively failed as a basis of reconciliation.
FACT: What conclusions were not justified? Why has the report effectively failed? By whose measure? By what metric? Indigenous Watchdog at least identifies exactly what is working and what is not and does not rely on bombastic rhetoric and pompous pronouncements to deny a given truth.
Free speech is a cornerstone of democracy. But not when the intent is to denigrate an entire population as residential school deniers do.
See also the following post from Indigenous Watchdog that delivers evidence of broader, more comprehensive genocidal policies: “Did Canada commit genocide against Indigenous people? You decide“.