Who Benefits from Residential School Denialism?

Defending Indigenous land rights is not just a matter of justice, argues Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything. It may be “the last line of defence” against a juggernaut doubling down on a high-carbon economy regardless of the costs, including the possible collapse of organized human society.

Extractivist and climate-threatening projects, like the Coastal GasLink pipeline, are sometimes driven through the territories of Indigenous Peoples without their prior and informed consent.

So it’s no surprise that those who favour expanding fossil fuel and resource extraction-based development would be drawn to viewpoints — “elective affinity,” sociologist Max Weber called it — that limit or delegitimize Indigenous claims to land or self-determination.

One weapon for doing so is residential school denialism. It’s an ideological project born of colonialism. It doesn’t deny the existence of the residential school system but rather downplays, excuses or misrepresents facts about the harms it caused.

Professors Sean Carleton and Daniel Heath Justice outline the many ways residential school denialism distorts history.

Residential school denialism narrowly defines the term “genocide” as ethnic cleansing like the Holocaust, thus excluding the deliberate erasure of cultures as a form of genocide applicable to Canada.

It underplays the nightmarish distinctiveness of residential “schools” as prisons, where legally kidnapped youngsters obtained little effective academic or vocational instruction, and were often abused.

Denialism asserts the “good intentions” of some administrators, constructs a false balance between “good” and “bad” elements of the system and focuses on a minority of individual positive recollections from the schools.

Like deniers of the Nazi Holocaust, residential school denialism seizes upon and exaggerates data ambiguities — like precise body counts of victims — that are inevitable in any complex historical process, particularly those deliberately shrouded in secrecy.

It’s a strategy to discredit the overwhelming historical evidence and survivor testimony, particularly through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of the genocidal nature of the schools.

Residential school denialism has reared its head in major party politics. In my home riding of North Island-Powell River, the federal Conservative candidate, Aaron Gunn, has been called out by First Nations leaders and many others for his dismissive views on residential schools. Is it a coincidence that his financial backers have included oil tycoons?

A local grassroots campaign called on the Conservative party leadership to “drop the Gunn” as their candidate and, if he remains on the ballot, encouraged progressive voters to strategically vote NDP as the most realistic option for defeating him in this riding.

‘This wasn’t about finding truth. It was about exerting power’

Last summer, I attended a lecture in my hometown, Powell River, by an individual denialist associated with the controversial book Grave Error. (That event was reported in The Tyee.)

In my view, the speaker misrepresented the core purpose of residential schools, used ambiguities about the evidence of graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School site to downplay the extent of children’s deaths in the system, trivialized the cultural value of preserving Indigenous languages, dissed the international phonetic alphabet as a guide for pronouncing Indigenous names and, for added measure, apparently denied the existence of trans people who do not fit into one of two genders.

The highly partisan audience frothed and applauded. Several declared their intention to run for council. This wasn’t about finding truth. It was about exerting power.

Given how the spread of residential school denialism retraumatizes survivors, Winnipeg MP Leah Gazan last year introduced a private member’s bill in Parliament proposing that it be criminalized, as Holocaust denial already is.

I'm not convinced we need to outlaw residential school denialism, but people and organizations have the right to decide not to spread it.

Regrettably, Powell River’s largest neighbourhood association, the Westview Ratepayers Society, used its newsletter to announce the local event. To be fair, it withdrew a previous, more fulsome announcement, did not mention the topic and ran a disclaimer that it wasn’t sponsoring the event. There are indications that its policy will be reviewed in the future.

More encouragingly, last fall, the city council endorsed a statement from the Union of BC Indian Chiefs condemning residential school denialism and asking municipal governments to challenge it.

And recently, the Powell River Peak newspaper declined to advertise a return event by the same speaker I heard last year.

That triggered an avalanche of flak. It included a scolding by National Post columnist Conrad Black, a convicted felon who was once described by Bob Rae, before he became Ontario's first NDP premier, as “a symbol of bloated capitalism at its worst.”

My colleagues on the board of the qathet Climate Alliance pledged not to use our own communication outlets “to disseminate hate speech or to publicize events by speakers who have a track record of promoting disinformation or contempt towards other individuals or groups in the community, one that includes our neighbours in Tla'amin Nation.”

Our statement specifically mentions both Holocaust denialism and residential school denialism, both complicit in whitewashing genocide.

We don’t need a U.S. hedge fund-owned newspaper chain, or an addition to criminal law, to connect the ideological dots between extractivism and denialism.

Or to take action in our own communities to counteract their spread.