This week marked the three-year anniversary of an announcement that shocked Canadians and others around the world.
Representatives of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia revealed that ground-penetrating radar had detected anomalies potentially representing the remains of 215 children at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The announcement provoked widescale interest into a central finding of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: that thousands of Indigenous children forced to attend church-run residential schools died or disappeared, their final resting places unknown.
Since the announcement by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, hundreds of investigations have taken place at former residential school sites. Virtually all are Indigenous-led, informed by credible researchers and are undergoing the painstakingly slow archival, ceremonial and forensic work to examine tonnes of soil.
Those efforts, hopefully, will turn up answers for the thousands of Indigenous families from whom little kids were taken but never returned.
Some searches, such as at the former Pine Creek Indian Residential School, have turned up empty. Research suggested there were, potentially, 14 sites underneath a church, but excavations found no evidence of human remains.
The children are still missing. The investigation should, and must, continue.
The past three years has seen an exponential rise in residential school denialists and those who deny claims by the Indigenous leaders, residential school survivors and credentialed researchers that the sites need to be searched for remains.
These people argue that since they haven’t seen skeletons, no one should believe the “hearsay” of survivors who testified at the TRC about the starvation, disease, abuse and murder inside those institutions.
Most argue that the people who ran residential schools had no agenda to harm children.
Denialists pick away at words reporters have used, such as “mass graves” and the original Tk’emlups te Secwepemc claim, that the “remains of 215 children” were found — later amended to clarify that they were anomalies, potential graves — to say the searches are based on “fake news.”
The real story is that First Nations are piecing together a story from incomplete church records, ground-penetrating radar and archives.
The extension of this argument is that the stories are full of exaggerations, lies to get cash settlements and evidence of little more than a nefarious Indigenous agenda.
The most frequent accusation made — especially this past week, in newspapers and TV shows — is that the past three years has been a “hoax” intended to inflame hatred towards churches, the federal government and non-Indigenous Canadians.
Researchers such as my University of Manitoba colleague Sean Carleton, University of British Columbia Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice and Kimberly Murray, the independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with residential schools, have spent a lot of time combating the denialists.
When confronted, the people shouting “hoax” frequently respond by saying they’re “simply seeking the truth.”
Triggered by recent events in the Middle East, this past week illustrated to me how the same arguments used to deny the Nazi genocide of European Jews during the Second World War are employed to undermine searches for lost children at residential schools.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says Holocaust denial is a “form of antisemitism, prejudice against or hatred of Jews” based on the “claim the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.” All “undermine the truth and our understanding of history,” writes the museum.
Let’s compare the arguments of advanced this week about residential schools with those of Holocaust deniers.
The Anti-Defamation League says denialists use three main points to say the Holocaust is a lie, exaggerated or intended for some nefarious Jewish agenda.
The first is the argument that the Nazis did not have a singular “master plan” for Jewish annihilation but was formed “gradually” through arbitrary individual and political interests.
The second is that witnesses to the Holocaust cannot be relied upon due to their lack of objectivity and a lack of Nazi documentation supporting their claims of genocide.
The third is the shifting number of Jewish deaths. At one point, researchers stated four million people had died at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi extermination camp. Decades later, that number was amended to 1.5 million.
Denying the “master plan” of residential schools? Check.
Denying the witness testimonies and lack of supporting documentation of residential schools? Check.
Denying the evidence of dead (as if this matters during a genocide) at residential schools? Check.
Let’s keep searching for our relations, and not let denialists undermine the truth and our understanding of history.
niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca
Niigaan Sinclair
Columnist
Niigaan Sinclair is Anishinaabe and is a columnist at the Winnipeg Free Press.
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