A better effort, still worrying

Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong
by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan (eds.)

Ottawa: True North, 2025
$22.99  /  9798274120593

Reviewed by Richard Butler

*

I was quite critical in my review of Grave Error. Readers, in their turn, were quite critical of me.¹

At the risk of losing my recently-won left-wing credentials,² I am bound to say that this sequel, Dead Wrong, is a much better book.

There are still a few instances of righteous indignation and conspiracy theory, but these are easy to spot and disregard.

There is happily much less of the defamatory innuendo about “rent-seeking” which stained too many chapters in Grave Error.

The overall tone of Dead Wrong—despite its provocative title, the publisher’s preface, and a couple of other instances—seems much less frenzied.

But most important, every chapter of this book contains something British Columbians may not have known and ought to have the chance to think about. Some chapters particularly so.

To do justice to this book, I must go chapter by chapter. That will add up to a very long review. But I ask readers (and my editor) to bear with me. Let’s take some time together to see why this book is so well worth reading.

*

“Canada’s Most Dangerous Book: How Quesnel went crazy over a local woman’s reading choices” by Tom Flanagan

The thrust of Flanagan’s chapter is that the legacy media have ignored Grave Error and declined opportunities to interview the book’s contributors because they do not wish to face the truths the book contains.³

Thus, Flanagan says, the media treated the controversy arising from the circulation of the book by the wife of the Mayor of Quesnel as a matter of local hurt feelings rather than honouring the guiding journalistic principle of free speech in the marketplace of ideas.

Flanagan attributes this to left-wing groupthink in the legacy media and the journalists it employs and links it to the attempts of Kimberly Murray, Independent Special Interlocutor, and MP Leah Kasan to shut down any questioning of residential school genocide.

He says the following: “The ‘grave issue’ is that the media are propounding—repeatedly, determinedly, consistently—a distorted and entirely one-sided view of one of the most important questions in Canadian politics.”

I have myself written repeatedly elsewhere that the fundamental difficulty is that neither side of the narrative/counter-narrative wants to admit there is a middle ground.

With all due respect, finding a middle ground in the marketplace of ideas was not an objective of Grave Error, nor of this book either.

*

“Collaboration No More: How the Powell River name-change debate turned nasty” by Frances Widdowson

I agree with almost everything Frances Widdowson writes in her chapter on the Powell River name change controversy.⁴ I also applaud Dr. Widdowson’s balanced telling of this story.

As with Mathew Baillie Begbie and Everton Ryerson, it is indeed passing strange “that such a liberal thinker [and for the most part⁵ pro-Indigenous political actor] as [Israel] Powell would be considered such a key villain by the pro-name-change lobby today.” Stranger still, as Widdowson documents, the town may in fact be named after a different Powell altogether.

If the facts are indeed as stated—and I have no reason to believe otherwise—the whole course of events Widdowson describes is deeply discouraging—antithetical to reconciliation, and not just locally. As Widdowson says:

The Powell River renaming process has deteriorated into a deeply divisive issue that has turned a once collaborative community into a fiercely combative [one]. …. Relations between native and non-native in Powell River have never been lower. The name change debate has become a political power play that has driven a wedge through this once placid community. What was supposed to be a healing process has metastasized into an attempt to impose the will of a minority on everyone else using tactics that would rightfully be denounced as violent and unacceptable if racial composition of the contenders were reversed.

The final sentence reveals a couple of Widdowson’s own prejudices. Nevertheless, this is a chapter all British Columbians should read.

*

“The Sacred Covenant of Kamloops: Replacing truth and reconciliation with secrecy and self-abasement” by Hymie Rubenstein

Hymie Rubenstein’s chapter on the Sacred Covenant has—as the chapter’s subtitle indicates—two themes: secrecy and self-abasement.

On secrecy

His first point on secrecy, in a nutshell, is that the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc have recognized they overstated the facts in, and after, their 2021 announcement of the discovery in the apple orchard, and are now trying to quietly walk it back. In this, Rubenstein may have a point.

The second is that this is all part of a broader policy to block the truth from coming out:

Secrecy and misdirection are entirely consistent with current practice by Indigenous groups involving the missing children and the unmarked graves controversy…. The Kamloops band continues to withhold the actual survey report … [and] despite … federal funding … there has never been any excavation of the alleged grave sites [nor] any core-sampling.

Rubenstein also complains of the lack of unfettered access for non-Indigenous researchers to the millions of federal government documents held in the University of Manitoba’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. This, Rubenstein suggests, is to limit “anyone suspected of holding heterodox or opposing views about residential schools or native politics.” Conspiracy theory.

On self-abasement

Of greater usefulness is Rubenstein’s exploration of the theme of self-abasement in the modern-day Catholic church in Canada.

His chapter posits self-abasement as the church’s possible motivation behind the Sacred Covenant. He describes “the grim sense of self-flagellation” and “the slow-rolling suicide of the Catholic church” as a reflection of Pope Francis’s liberation theology, moral relativism, and the general rise of left-wing wokeness; and he links this to a willing acquiescence in the supposed secrecy around what really happened at the residential schools.

He contrasts all of that the view of “optimism and joy” expressed in Pope John Paul II’s 1984 statement in Yellowknife, “firmly supported by evidence going back to first contact between the Church and Canada’s Indigenous people in the early 1600s.”

He says “the Sacred Covenant thus continues the Catholic Church’s decades-long repudiation of itself and what was once its essential mission of spreading the word of Jesus.” He challenges the Church to “[have] the nerve to tell Indigenous leaders and activists that their residential school revisionist revolution has gone too far.”

Rubenstein is entitled to his opinions and conclusions on this subject. They are reached without any slagging of Indigenous leaders and activists, other than to accuse them of revisionism. They might easily have been authored by conservative Catholic columnist Father Raymond J. DeSousa, as they spring from the same moral justification in the now-discredited “doctrine of discovery.”

My point here is that British Columbians benefit from a book which makes Rubenstein’s arguments, even if they ultimately decide to disagree with him.

*

“When Will The New York Times Correct Its Flawed Reporting on ‘Unmarked Graves’?” by Jonathan Kay

Jonathan Kay’s short chapter brings us up to date on the extreme inaccuracy of New York Times journalist Ian Austen in his initial reporting of “mass graves,” and Mr. Austen’s subsequent writings on the subject which—if I may say so—only dig himself and his newspaper deeper in.

Kay’s essential point is undeniably right: Canadians may reasonably expect that things written about our country “should be true, and that stubbornness and professional pride shouldn’t stand in the way of the continent’s most influential newspaper correcting the bungled reporting that appeared in its papers.”

Well done, Jonathan. Keep after them. And good luck with that.

*

“The Bitter Roots of ‘Sugarcane’” by Michelle Stirling

I first read Michelle Stirling’s article on Sugarcane when I was writing my own review of the film. Re-reading it now, I am surprised at how many of Stirling’s insights found their way into my review. I am also impressed, again, at the persuasive fact-checking behind Stirling’s work.

Stirling makes a powerful case that the film is deceptive in its failure to make the facts clear—including by omission, association, overdramatization, and innuendo. It saddens me to think that Emily Kassie could have latched onto and capitalize on a community’s trauma and confusion, historical and present-day—if that is what she did. Or that Julian Brave NoiseCat could seemingly be persuaded to go along.

The main difference between Stirling’s article and my review turns out to be Stirling’s attribution to Kassie and NoiseCat of an intention to obfuscate and deceive viewers on what really happened at the St. Joseph’s mission and, by analogy, at other residential schools. What she calls “a beautiful deception.”

In my review, I raised the contrary possibility that what the film documents most persuasively is the psychologically-tormented aftermath of the truth and reconciliation process; and that, in the result, what the film really shows are instances of willing self-deception to justify the psychological trauma people are genuinely feeling. Telling themselves the “victim story.”

In making that case, I pointed out ambiguities in the stories being depicted. I did admit in my review that my interpretation was perhaps super-subtle; and, reflecting on it now, perhaps wishful thinking on my part.

Go back and watch the film (again) with a less impressionistic view of the key material facts. Then see what you think.

*

“The Burning: Canada’s churches ablaze” by Cosmin Dzsurdzsa

I had heard, of course, about the church burnings following the Kamloops announcement. But before reading Cosma Dzsurdzsa’s chapter, I had had no idea of the number of them; or that some churches without any connection to a residential school were burned nonetheless.

Dzsurdzsa’s chapter reminds us that, however “understandable” the underlying anger may have been, the burnings were acts of criminal vandalism and completely unacceptable whatever the motivation behind them.

Dzsurdzsa notes the lack of much in the way of legal consequences and rightly asks why. Part of the answer, he suggests, has been to avoid distracting attention from the nascent competing narrative of genocide. Sad if true.

The language Dzsurdzsa uses is often inflammatory and his closing comments respecting Sean Carleton add little, but otherwise this is a very helpful chapter.

*

“The Prime Minister’s Father–and what happened in a classroom during the Kamloops hysteria” by Jim McMurtry

Jim McMurtry’s chapter on his termination from employment with the Abbotsford school district is extremely telling. Anyone who wants to know why that happened should read it.

McMurtry eloquently damns himself.

Whatever his attitudes or beliefs about an issue may be, at the moment in question he evidently forgot that the job of a school teacher (even a substitute teacher) is not to tell students what to think but to teach them how to learn.

McMurtry missed a teaching moment. Instead, by his own account, he joined issue with his students on the merits of the Kamloops question. He did so at the very worst time possible.

His chapter ends in a rant about “young and gullible orange-shirted Social Justice Warriors that self-laudatory Progressive DEI schools are forming in imitation of Hitler’s brown-shirted youth.”

This too is a must-read chapter for British Columbians, but not for the reasons McMurtry might wish. He seemingly cannot recognize—even in retrospect—how grossly inappropriate his conduct and attitudes were and are for a teacher of young people.

*

“The Shameful Cancelling of Bishop Grandin” by Hymie Rubenstein

Hymie Rubinstein’s chapter tells us about the successful proposal to have the name of Winnipeg’s Bishop Grandin Boulevard changed to Abinoki Mikanah (meaning “Children’s Road”); and the unsuccessful proposal to have a section of a different road named for former Premier Edward Shreyer, which was treated by First Nation activists as “offensive” and “triggering.”

The chapter’s theme is about the activist notion of “being on the right side of history.” Translation: Maybe the victors get to write history, but in the fullness of time the vanquished apparently get to re-write it, or as they might say “evolve it.” It is a point worth thinking about.

Rubinstein’s own mind seems pretty well made up: 

How this insipid reversion to a preliterate language that most urban people no longer speak or understand could be anything but retrogressive seems to have escaped [activists’] attention…[F]ew if any aboriginals would willingly revert to their full-fledged pre-industrial lifeway based on a constant and insecure struggle for survival surrounded by hostile enemies from other Indigenous groups.

Bishop Grandin was a man of his time, sincere and tireless (perhaps even ardent) in his desire to “help” Indigenous people who were dying as a consequence of contact with European diseases.

I agree with Rubinstein that Grandin, like many others of his time, does not deserved to be “cancelled.” But it is a shame that Rubinstein latches onto Grandin’s history as a means to spread what can fairly be described as his own manifest modern-day colonialism.

*

“Residential Schools Were No ‘Atrocity.’ Look at the evidence” by Nigel Biggar

It is a classic strategy of Holocaust deniers to minimize the number of dead and obfuscate on the motivation and circumstances surrounding their deaths.⁶ I hasten to say that is not at all Lord Biggar’s intent.

Moreover, Biggar’s information about the number of deaths at residential schools, the causes of them, and the reasons the children were there in the first place seems—from everything else I have read—to be much closer to factually accurate than the numbers and narratives the media have latched onto.

But in saying there was “no atrocity,” Biggar does not tell the whole story.

Having read Jim Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision, and likely also John Milloy’s A National Crime, Biggar knows full well of the constant and widespread attacks on the children’s ontology which left them without a sense of who they were as persons, alienated from their traditions, and fearful that their families were damned to hell.⁷

Many who stayed the course at school left without a sense of who they were, and with nowhere to go, psychologically, once they got out. Of course that was the whole purpose: missionaries convert. The presumption is, for the better. Unfortunately, that was not the practical result for many who attended the schools, and their own children and grandchildren down to the present day.

In the result, media inaccuracy on the numbers of deaths is almost beside the point.

As for compulsory attendance, Biggar is again technically correct. The law never required children to be sent to residential schools; and over the years roughly one-third of them went to Indian day schools, and an additional number to provincial schools.⁸

But again, it is the lived experience Biggar omits.

That is best described in the words of J.F. Woodsworth, the principal of a residential school in Edmonton, delivered to a conference in 1942. Woodsworth spoke of “going into an Indian home or teepee and taking little Indian children from that home, sometimes at bed-time hour, when the mother should be putting her child to rest for the night, and in rushing with my load of children into the night miles away, to put them into my school.” He said the parents trusted him and “were in a way willing for the children to go—but it was not essentially right.”⁹

It is a point of ethics which should resonate with Regius Professor Biggar.

*

“Canada Wanted to Close All Residential Schools in the 1940s. Here’s why it couldn’t.” by Greg Piasetzki

In this must-read chapter, Greg Piasetzki sets out to rebut the assertion of genocide at and through the residential school system:

While conditions in some schools were less than ideal–perhaps even abusive–due to budget shortfalls and poor staffing, the schools existed to fill a necessary and irreplaceable role.

In the beginning, this role was to provide Indigenous children with the language skills and other Western knowledge essential for their successful participation in Canadian society.

As time went on, however, the schools transformed to fill an even more vital role. They became a de facto child welfare system for vulnerable children from dysfunctional homes brought on by centuries of alcohol abuse within Indigenous communities.

By the 1940s, federal bureaucrats knew there were better options for educating native students, but as much as they would have preferred to shut down residential schools, they couldn’t. Doing so would have abandoned the many individual welfare cases these schools protected.

The information Piasetzki presents respecting the scope of this dysfunctionality is extremely unsettling, although I decry any inference that the “centuries of alcohol abuse” were in any way Indigenous peoples’ fault.

Moreover, the scale of the problem, as Piasetzki reports it, is quite astounding. In 1966, he says, fully 75 percent of residential school students were “welfare cases,” and in some schools almost all were within that classification.

It was no better, Piasetzki says, once the provinces took over responsibility for child welfare:

Given the circumstances on reserves, having white families foster vulnerable native children was considered by many child welfare experts to be the best available option. The Sixties Scoop was driven by the same intractable conditions …: in the absence of any other viable alternatives, it was considered the only way to help desperate children in need. [emphasis added]

Nor, he submits, will matters improve under the 2019 federal legislation which, among other things, makes it impossible to apprehend Indigenous children from dysfunctional homes without meeting a “cultural continuity” test. The foundational problems, he says, will not have gone away.

So, in conclusion with respect to the genocide question, Piasetzki submits that “the residential school system was never the cause, but one of many attempted solutions”–justified as necessary in the first place and as the best/only available option later on.

The facts and evidence on which Piasetzki bases his arguments may well be true, but they are incomplete and the argument as a whole needs unpacking.

Piasetzki omits to mention the following:

• The reason education was considered imperative by some Indigenous leaders in early days was (to quote from Jim Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision¹⁰) “[so] that [our children] may learn to read and put words on paper and count, so that white traders might not cheat them.”
• Under the treaties and as reflected in the earliest provisions under the Indian Act, schools were supposed to be located on reserve; which may have worked in the southern reaches of Lower and Upper Canada but not in more remote regions and not on a multitude of small reserves with low population.
• Even Nicholas Davin, reporting to the prime minister in 1879 and while advocating in favour of schooling away from the “influence of the wigwam,” recommended against the wholesale adoption of residential industrial schools in Canada.
• Even Duncan Campbell Scott, while Department Superintendent of Education in 1909-11, seriously questioned the viability of residential schools without wide-reaching funding and institutional reform; but the per capita funding system he implemented always remained inadequate to the schools’ needs, especially given the challenges in securing full enrolment; and the government’s new rules respecting health care and quality of education—which would have required additional funding—were simply not enforced, largely for reasons of government and church parsimony.
• Placement at residential schools of children from dysfunctional homes was never the only option, except on a presumption that the homes of other Indigenous families would automatically be equally dysfunctional for purposes of child placement.

In sum (again quoting from Jim Miller),

[residential schools] gradually [became] the vehicle of the newcomers’ attempts to refashion and culturally eliminate the first inhabitants’ way of life … disrupt[ing] Native families and individual identity … sever[ing] the ties that bound Native children to their families and communities, leaving semi-assimilated young people and shattered communities.

No wonder so many of those children, and their own children and grandchildren, had recourse to alcohol, resulting in (among other things) Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. No wonder their family lives were turbulent.

Nor was it a new problem emerging in the 1940s. The foundations of the problem had been there since Confederation or before: chronic lack of funding from government and the churches; willful blindness on their part; and blithe acquiescence in the status quo by the non-Indigenous Canadian public at large, down through the years.

Genocide? I don’t know. But hardly a creditable attempt at a solution to a persistent set of problems and challenges that were not of Indigenous peoples’ making.

*

“What Was School Life Really Like?” The Grey Sisters’ Chronicles

The Grey Sisters’ chronicles of daily life at St. Mary’s Residential school at Standoff, Alberta, from 1946 to 1948 makes for interesting reading, especially for its account of the medical care provided.

However, it is a mistake made on both sides of the genocide debate to extrapolate from evidence at a single school during select years presented from only one of the participant party’s points of view in order to show what the schools were really like.

*

“Open Letter to the Honourable Arif Virani, Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada, and the Honourable Gary Anandasangaree, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations” by Michelle Stirling

In an open letter to the then-Ministers, dated October 30, 2024, Michelle Stirling makes a case for the withdrawal of Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray’s final report on missing children and unmarked graves.

Stirling’s main argument is that

Ms. Murray has built a case for creating a new legal framework to investigate a crime of genocide with no named victims. She advocates for criminalizing the historical assessments of people like me because I am asking … uncomfortable questions. There is nothing hateful in my desire to excavate the truth. The criminal allegations against Canadians are serious, and yet they are being tried in the court of public opinion, and media, not in a court of law.

…

“Genocide” is not a crime decided in the press–it is decided in the courts and based upon evidence, not the childhood recollections of now elderly people. It is not a crime about which people must be ‘convinced’ but about which there must be actual evidence.

Aspects of Stirling’s argument are quite persuasive:

• That assertions of a physical genocide of children through “enforced disappearance” are made without evidence;

• That Murray’s presentation suffers from “presentism” with respect to the treatment of situations and people, lacking regard for historical context and contemporary social services standards;

• That Murray’s evidence from survivor testimonials may in some instances have been tainted by systemic confirmation bias.

Other aspects are less compelling, including that China and other dictatorial states will use Murray’s report and urgings of prosecution at the International Criminal Court to Canada’s detriment. Moreover, Stirling’s case is not helped by her comments about Sean Carleton, her personal attack on Tanya Talaga or her plentiful use of language of righteous indignation.

But putting those concerns aside, the chapter is worth reading for its point-in-time positioning.

*

“ ‘A Saga of Terrible Abuses.’ Really?” by Ian Gentles and Pim Wiebel

Ian Gentles and Pim Wiebel set out in their chapter to question the assertion that the residential school story was “a saga of terrible abuses.”

They do so through a plethora of favourable evidence and quotations on a list of topics that will be familiar to those who read their contributions to Grave Error.

Their evidence leads them to conclude that

residential schools were bulwarks against forces in the general Canadian society, such as the public schools and popular culture, that historically ignored Indigenous languages and traditions. More than any other educational venue, the residential schools helped Indigenous children keep a connection with their mother tongue and heritage. Whatever cultural genocide may have been perpetrated in Canada, it was not carried out in the residential schools.

Yet their detailed evidence and positive conclusions are impossible to reconcile with most people’s understanding respecting the schools.

That, of course, is the authors’ point:

The negative indictment of the Indian Residential Schools is derived largely from anonymous oral evidence based on recollections reaching back over half a century. On the other hand, the written and printed evidence generated during the period when the schools were in operation paints a mainly positive picture of what life was like there.

Well, that may to a degree be true. But the authors’ conclusions do not comport with the detailed and balanced history presented by scholars like Jim Miller.

In sum, there is a huge amount of detailed and valuable information set out in this chapter, which is good to have in hand. However, one cannot help but feel that it has been cherry-picked to counter the existing mainstream narrative.

*

“They Would Call Me a ‘Denier’: Let me explain what I believe about residential schools in Canada” by Rod Clifton

Rod Clifton’s first-person, commonsense account of why—if there had been murders at the residential schools—someone connected with or visiting the schools would surely have said so is both human and compelling.

His closing segment on what needs to be done to resolve the issue of denialism seems a little naive:

 

1. Appoint a blue-ribbon RCMP task force to investigate the accusations that children are missing and possibly murdered at residential schools.

 

2. If this task force finds evidence of malfeasance, a forensic investigation—by competent independent professionals and not by either the churches or the Indigenous bands—should be conducted in the schoolyards where people think residential school children were buried.

 

3. If this investigation finds evidence that children were murdered, legal proceedings should be commenced and the names of deceased abuser/murderers should be published.

 

4. A report of the investigation should be tabled in Parliament and distributed to Canadians, just as the TRC Report was distributed.

Clifton notes that Indigenous organizations have so far resisted such a thorough criminal investigation. But he says it needs to be done. Many would agree.

Yet it is impossible to think that a process so essential to truth and reconciliation could proceed without Indigenous leadership. “Nothing about us without us.” There simply must be independent Indigenous task force members available, with the required credentials and whose impartiality is beyond question.

*

“The Real Camsell Hospital” by Eric Schloss

Somehow, the multi-faceted controversy surrounding the Camsell Hospital and others like it had escaped my notice until I read this chapter. The same may be true for other British Columbians.

As I now gather, hospitals such as the Camsell have been attacked, among other things, on the basis:

• That they were underfunded, overcrowded and rife with coercion;

 

• That patients received substandard care, poor food, were lonely and frustrated;

 

• That they engaged in forced sterilizations, and gratuitous drug and surgical experiments amounting to abuse;

 

• That the goal of Indian hospitals was racial segregation and isolation.

Dr. Schloss reports that he and numerous medical colleagues “have been upset by the more recent negative coverage of the Camsell which, as part of the general criticism of Canada’s federal ‘Indian Hospitals,’ has often been misleadingly conflated with the residential school controversies and the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” That has included claims that murder and torture occurred at the hospital, which Schloss asserts are totally false.

Schloss persuasively addresses each of the claims, one by one, hoping “to dispel the misinformation, myths, and negative beliefs about that worthy institution and its personnel.”

I am not knowledgeable enough to critique Schloss’s chapter—if indeed it needs critiquing.

My only point of slight concern is this. The chapter reads as if it has followed a template of fact-intensive arguments and testimonials such as other authors have used to suggest that residential schools were an overall positive in the history of Indigenous people in the country. As indicated earlier, I have my doubts on that score.

*

“The Indigenous ‘Land Back’ Movement: A land mine for Canadians” by Michael Melanson

Michael Melanson’s chapter provides a rich analysis of the Land Back movement as it has gained expression in Canada—even if, as the chapter proceeds, the rhetoric increases.

Particularly helpful is the sense Melanson gives of Land Back’s variety of meanings.

For instance, Melanson quotes from Ronald Gamblin, an Anishinaabe from Manitoba who is National Learning Community Coordinator of the 4Rs Youth Movement, as follows:

When you look at it, as Indigenous peoples and nations, we come from the land. The land is our home, our mother, our caregiver, it’s what makes us Indigenous. Considering this, non-Indigenous folks need to understand that land back is about much more than land. …. Land Back is about Indigenous peoples confronting colonialism at the root. It’s about fighting for the right to our relationship with the earth. It’s about coming back to ourselves, as sovereign Indigenous Nations.

For himself, Melanson draws together the various meanings of Land Back as follows:

[It] is a militant iteration of aboriginal nationalism. Proponents often disavow the legitimacy of Canada and the United States and frequently express hostility to their citizenry, whom they label “settler colonialists.” As in virtually all expressions of ethnic and racial nationalism, an autonomous sovereign territory is sought by some Land Back proponents.

On that last point, Melanson quotes from the 2019 “manifesto,” Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper” (the “New Red Paper”), which he says “aims to rationalize aboriginal sovereignty and, assert fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction.” Melanson expresses the following concern:

The [New Red Paper] proposes a radical departure from liberal-democratic norms. It seeks to override the non-Indigenous nation-state and privilege a minority on the basis of ethnic/racial origin…The Red Paper authors appear to be suggesting that Indigenous organizations (to be determined) be given supra-jurisdictional authority…as a birthright.

Melanson’s chapter closes with the following:

“We should take caution,” Melanson’s chapter closes. “Between the pity, reverence, and romanticization of Indigenous peoples and ways, there is a blind spot in which a ruthless racialist ideology can continue to grow.”

For myself, I too am strongly resistant to the social revisionist notions underlying movements like “Idle No More” and Land Back. But, on the other hand, I am convinced that there is an irrefutable basis to argue for the historical and legal pre-existence of First Nations in what has since become Canada, and thus for Indigenous rights of co-sovereignty in relation to governance of traditional lands.

This is a complicated subject. British Columbians should indeed “take caution” in extending overblown concepts like “ruthless racialist ideology” to the practical, non-ideological questions which now challenge our governments and our courts.

*

“Lawyers Should Apologize for False Accusations” by Brian Giesbrecht

Brian Giesbrecht’s chapter retells the story of media, political, and public hysteria over the discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of 215 children supposedly murdered and then secretly buried by the administration of the Kamloops residential school.

Giesbrecht’s focus is on an “inflammatory” June, 2021, letter from a group of prominent lawyers to the International Criminal Court “demanding” an investigation into those alleged crimes.

Giesbrecht writes:

My point is that the national hysteria over the supposed “missing children” at Kamloops and elsewhere was intense at the time these lawyers made their sensational claim, and their horrific accusation only took it higher. One would expect that if anyone would carefully check their facts, and do their research before making such an incredibly incendiary claim, it would be professionally trained lawyers, some of whom are KCs.

That point is well taken.

However, Giesbrecht’s musings on the possible consequences of the publication of the lawyers’ letter are unhelpful. They serve mainly as an opportunity for Giesbrecht to vent.

The chapter closes as follows:

Maybe these lawyers were just caught up in the moment. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect any more from them than we do from anyone else. But I don’t believe that. I believe that there is a higher bar for these professionals. Without adequate research and investigation, they used their privileged position in society…ramping up the hysteria when they should have been doing the exact opposite.

In my respectful view, Giesbrecht himself is apparently caught up in just such a moment. “Ramping up” is a good description of the tone and thrust of this chapter. By his own measure, it seems fair to expect better from a retired judge.  

*

“Criminalizing ‘Residential School Denialism’: What are the political and academic implications?” by Frances Widdowson

This second chapter from Dr. Widdowson eloquently expresses many of the core ideas which animate this book.

She writes that Leah Gazan’s private members bill proposing that residential school denialism be made a criminal offence was

the result of “truth and reconciliation” processes that have been unfolding for a number of decades, as well as the prominence of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives in many Canadian institutions; [and that the] result is serious negative consequences for knowledge development and open inquiry.

To make that case, she starts with Sean Carleton’s notion that denialism is the “rejection or misrepresentation of basic facts about residential schooling.” She observes that asserting the system was “genocidal” is not a matter of fact but (as a lawyer would say) a conclusion of law.

Nor—she says—is it even a conclusion based on facts in evidence, but on the “false claim” about the remains of 215 children being confirmed on the grounds of the former Kamloops residential school.

She segues into the factual elements which would be needed to reach a legal conclusion of genocide and correctly observes there is no evidence proving intent to destroy: that is, of unmarked graves; of forced attendance; of deprivation of necessaries of life.

Widdowson’s argument then engages the distinction between “factual truths” and “relative truths,” referring to the latter as a feature of postmodernism which has gained sway in academe. She then makes the following key point:

What has not been recognized is that the postmodern replacement of the aspiration to objectivity with the subjective beliefs of groups perceived to be oppressed makes it impossible to develop and disseminate accurate knowledge about the history of the residential schools. The idea that “Knowledge Keepers” must be believed results in all sorts of highly improbable claims being made that go unchallenged.

She submits that memory is unreliable and can be changed with suggestions of others or through a “false consensus effect,” leading people to assume that those who don’t agree have some kind of deficiency.”

As an adjunct to that effect in academe, she points out the role of “academic missionary” and the concern that contrary research findings can, as alleged in Widdowson’s own case, result in a poisoned workplace, boycotts, and wrongful termination. She goes on to say that “criminalization, which academics like Carleton now support, is the last stage of DEI ideology spreading into the wider society.”

So far, so good.

Regrettably, Widdowson closes her chapter with the assertion that the postmodern approach to relative truth—instead of truth in the actual sense, based on factual evidence—both in academe and as a foundation for Gazan’s private member’s bill, “has little to do with the actual character of residential schools, and a great deal to do with the reparations that can be extracted by claiming that the residential schools were genocidal.”

As elsewhere, Widdowson makes the defamatory claim of “rent-seeking” without advancing factual evidence in support. Her claim may be based on inferences she genuinely believes to be accurate; but that does not make them true “in the actual sense” or acceptable in academic discourse.

Like teacher Jim McMurtry and retired judge Giesbrecht, Dr. Widdowson is hoisted on her own petard.

*

“The Subversion of Law: When Indigenous feelings trump non-Indigenous liberties” by James Pew

James Pew’s chapter about how the British Columbia Law Society has dealt with the questions of fact relating to unmarked graves discovered at Kamloops raises the following areas of interest:

• The mandatory Indigenous cultural sensitivity course;¹¹

• B.C. lawyer Jim Heller’s 2021 AGM resolution to include the word “potentially” with reference to “unmarked burial site,” and also to take out the words “the discovery confirms what survivors have been saying all along;”¹²

• The responsibility of lawyers, and by extension the Law Society, to speak up in defence of judges;¹³

• The Law Society’s overreach of its jurisdiction in purporting to serve as a gatekeeper in relation to lawyers and issues of social justice:¹⁴

Ordinary readers (i.e. non-lawyers) might well consider this as a tempest in a teapot.

To generate broader interest, Pew attributes what happened to the “social vision of the radical left,” where “sympathy for Indigenous people has overwhelmed people’s sense of propriety, their sense of truth.” Etc.

Radical leftism reportedly required that Heller “be made an example of” by the Law Society.

Pew doesn’t say exactly how.

Instead, he refers to the “shameful” ouster of MLA Dallas Brodie from the BC Conservative Party caucus for saying that the “number of confirmed child burials … is zero.”

Ousted by that radical leftist, then-party leader John Rustad.

*

Closing

In closing, I must be brief. As I said in the introduction, this is—with some qualifications—a much better book than Grave Error. Persons of conscience can read it without shame. Although perhaps not while sitting in a café at the university.

*

Richard Butler lives on the traditional territory of the lekwungen-speaking Peoples, a retired lawyer and sometime law professor, and more recently a writer on various Indigenous subjects. He is the author of Taking Reconciliation Personally, I Dare Say… Conversations with Indigeneity, and the recent title What Is This? Who Am I?: Culturally Informed Appreciation of Coastal Peoples’ Artworks, published through A & R Publishing. [Editor’s Note: Richard Butler wrote a reflection on The Salmon Celebration in the Okanagan, the essay An Exercise in Futility, and has recently reviewed the films Sugarcane & Racing to keep our language alive: H̓ágṃ́ṇtxv Qṇtxv Tx̌ (We’re all we got) and books by Richard Stursberg, Jody Wilson-Raybould & Roshan Danesh, Marianne Ignace & Ronald E. Ignace, Philip Seagram, Val Napoleon, Rebecca Johnson, Richard Overstall and Debra McKenzie (eds.), and C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan (eds.) for The British Columbia Review.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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Notes

1. Thanks to a mention by Terry Glavin in therealstory@substack.com , who said the review was “fair,” it  received an unprecedented number of “hits” on British Columbia Review and generated a great many comments. But nothing so far from Flannigan or the other contributors to this book. ↩︎
2. Full disclosure: a friend has fondly referred to me as a “true Upper Canada College conservative.” As commentator Linda Rogers was rightly heard to say, “Consider the source.” ↩︎
3. I can relate to Flanagan’s frustration when other people don’t read one’s books or articles. ↩︎
4. My main point of qualification in relation to the “martyrdom” of Ted Vizzutti and Brian Burroughs would be that, in personnel matters, other factors may have been in play. ↩︎
5. Other than in relation to the potlatch ban. ↩︎
6. See for example the books on the David Irving defamation proceedings. ↩︎
7. I read and then reported on these two books in chapters 12 and 13 of Taking Reconciliation Personally (2023), A & R Publishing (on Amazon). ↩︎
8. I explored this point as well at various places throughout that book. ↩︎
9. Id., p. 364 ↩︎
10. J.S. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: a History of Native Residential Schools (1996) U of T Press. ↩︎
11. Which I support in principle. However, when (as a Law Society member and at their invitation) I set out to critique it, I found it contained (and still contains) so many errors and omissions that I hardly knew where to begin. ↩︎
12. I supported the first change in the interests of factual accuracy but felt the second would be the death knell of the motion—insensitive and not strictly necessary. I wrote to Heller to that effect. ↩︎
13. As when Justice Shelley Fitzpatrick said, correcting a defence lawyer’s submissions in a sentencing hearing “there are no bodies that have been unearthed”—a statement subsequently affirmed on appeal in reasons for judgment by Chief Justice Marchand. ↩︎
14. See also Law Society of British Columbia v. Trinity Western University, 2018 SCC 32 (CanLII), [2018] 2 SCR 293 ↩︎