Regular readers will recall my intermittent objections to the most extreme allegations of atrocities committed against Indigenous people in Canada, particularly in the residential schools. The process of official self-defamation of the government and people of this country as genocidists is a much more outrageous scandal than the conduct of those who created the residential schools and related Aboriginal policies. The Trudeau government has deliberately proclaimed and incited the world to believe that this country has been guilty of attempted genocide. That is a monstrous blood libel on English and French Canadians and as I have written and said many times, it is a betrayal of Canada that should morally disqualify the government from re-election.
Among the latest episodes in this saga is a submission to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated With Indian Residential Schools (Canada). The United Nations official to whom this submission was addressed, Francisco Cali Tzay, is presumably the officeholder who inspired Prime Minister Trudeau to swaddle David Johnston in the portentous title “special rapporteur,” Trudeau’s ill-fated Chinese electoral interference whitewash. An even more pretentiously styled office is the special interlocutor, Kimberly Murray, who has no more standing than anyone else in the world, without exception, to write as she did to this particular special rapporteur.
Ms. Murray was given this position in June 2022 and the order-in-council installing her required her to advise the minister of justice, not to petition the UN special rapporteur, as she did on January 30 of this year, with a 21-page submission of almost uninterrupted falsehoods. Her submission has been forcefully rebutted in subsequent responses to Mr. Tzay, but several points should be emphasized. Ms. Murray wrote that “The existence of unmarked graves and burial sites of children who died while being forced to attend Indian residential schools in Canada is a stark example of the ongoing harm of assimilative of government laws… The Indian residential school system was put in place for the express purpose of ’killing the Indian in the child’ and has been characterized as genocide by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC).”
This is almost completely false. There is not a single verified “unmarked grave and burial site” of residential school children other than those burial sites that were previously known or on record. The federal government authorized $27 million to locate such unmarked graves but those responsible for conducting this investigation have not even excavated one of the original suspect sites.
The phrase about “killing the Indian in the child” never had anything to do with official policy and was likely first used in reference to residential schools by the historian John Milloy in 1999 and was popularized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair in a scandalously inaccurate speech at the United Nations in 2010. Application forms from thousands of parents who voluntarily enrolled their children in residential schools are publicly available on the Library and Archives School of Files Series website. Thousands of orphans were accepted by residential schools because they had no living parents nor any relative or member of their community to care for them. While it is undoubtedly true that many of the students were treated very poorly, and some were abused, it is also true that they also had substantially enhanced capabilities of going on to prosperous and successful adulthood as a result of their attendance. The great majority of those who died in the schools were victims of tuberculosis and other diseases, and many students contracted tuberculosis before they were enrolled in the schools.
Then Murray's letter also states: “Based on significant documentary evidence and survivor testimony the TRC concluded that many children who were forcibly taken to these institutions were subject to neglect, mistreatment, and extreme physical, sexual, spiritual and mental abuse by those entrusted with their care… Many children were never returned home from Indian residential schools.”
She adds: “Survivors have shared information of children who were there one day then disappeared the next, of newborn babies being put into incinerators, being forced to dig the graves of children who died.” Ms. Murray provides no verifiable evidence whatsoever for these claims of mysterious deaths. There is none, and none is to be found in the TRC Report.
Ms. Murray further wrote that ”In the years following the TRC inquiry there is a growing recognition amongst Canadians that the (Indian Residential Schools) constituted genocide.” That is a lie. It is not an exaggeration, hyperbole, or an arguable position. It is a lie. Attaching the syllable “cide” to a word connotes physical annihilation, as in suicide, homicide, or insecticide. Cultural genocide is really assimilation, which does not mean the extermination of another culture, and is not always discreditable or even involuntary. There were many mistakes in this country’s Aboriginal policy over many years, but it is a heinous falsehood to impute to any official policy of any jurisdiction of this country a desire to conduct any kind of genocide against anyone. “Cultural genocide” is a malicious sophistry. This claim was largely respectablized by former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, but it is both a conceptual fraud and a shameful historical slur.
When rigorous research finally catches up with the horrifying exaggerations of those who claim that our forebears were responsible for the systematic murder of the native people, we may turn to the question of why Canadian opinion has been such fertile ground for these appalling fictions. My own theory is that in our long-ingrained reflex to emulate the Americans, since we cannot reproach ourselves for slavery, (despite Beverley McLachlin’s attempt to drag us into that cesspool as well), the best we can do at pseudo-historical self-torment is to invite and to join the native victimhood industry, which often has more to do with the progressive politics of the day than anything else, in morally crucifying us as a nationality. In the spirit of Canada Day just past, we should make a collective effort to face up to the full gravity of the fact that, though thoroughly imperfect, our history is one of the least blameworthy of any nation in the world and it is rightly a subject of modest pride and not confected shame.
