If Indigenous lobby groups are good at anything, it’s composing vitriolic resolutions full of Shakespearean “sound and fury signifying nothing.”
A recent example is the emotion-laden resolution passed on June 11 by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (UBCIC), an Indigenous special-interest organization representing 175 BC Indian Bands with tens of thousands of members, distributed to all BC municipalities on August 12.
The two-month gap between the unanimous passage of the resolution and its public distribution last week suggests this was done as part of a coast-to-coast lobby effort to reverse federal government cuts to the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund established to help Indigenous communities search for children they allege never returned home from their Indian Residential Schools. (As insignificant as the resolution’s role may have been in this effort, the overall national effort to shame the federal government into rescinding the cut was a huge success.)
The contents of the UBCIC’s Rejection of Residential School Denialism resolution, a chest-pounding and hot air-blowing “sound and fury” document, represent a near total rejection of the well documented purpose, history, operation, and legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.
Preceded by fourteen inflammatory ‘whereas’ clauses, one of the sub-resolutions says:
THEREFORE BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED the UBCIC Chiefs Council stands with survivors and intergenerational survivors of Residential Schools and their families, as well as the children who never made it home and all those who are harmed by the actions of those involved with the production and distribution of the book Grave Error – How the Media Misled Us and the deeply troubling trend of Residential School racist denialism and any unwillingness to accept historical fact and the work of experts.
The resolution also calls on “all levels of government and the public,” among other things, to “uphold the testimony of those with lived experience who survived and witnessed crimes and human rights violations” at residential schools.
That Grave Error is negatively referenced five times in the declaration speaks volumes to the desire of the UBCIC to defame both its authors and its contents without providing any facts supporting its central claim that “Residential School racist denialism and ardent dissemination of racist disinformation” was “put forward by the authors of Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools).”
Grave Error, edited by Tom Flanagan and C. P. Champion, and jointly published by True North and the Dorchester Books in December 2023, constitutes a response to the moral panic unleashed in Canada on May 27, 2021, when the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc (legally the Kamloops Indian Band) falsely claimed that it had found “the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.” The same UBCIC poured oil on the flames and further amplified the moral panic on June 30, 2021, when it passed a resolution falsely claiming that a mass grave had been found at Kamloops.
Grave Error sought to correct these false claims.
The task has not been a simple one. Canadian newspaper editors chose the Kamloops announcement as the “news story of the year.” Over the following months, a more comprehensive but equally sinister narrative grew out of the initial Kamloops announcement. Based on similar announcements about other old burial sites, this narrative can be summarized as follows:
- Most Indigenous children were compelled to attend Indian Residential Schools;
- Thousands of children sent to these schools were never heard from again;
- These “missing children” are buried in unmarked graves near the schools;
- Many of these “missing children” were murdered by school personnel after being subjected to horrendous abuse;
- Human remains have already been found by ground-penetrating radar, but these constitute only a tiny fraction of the “missing children”;
- Residential school attendance destroyed Indigenous languages and culture, creating inter-generational trauma and social pathologies.
- Taken together, all this constitutes a genocide.
The UBCIC resolution accepts all these statements as truthful, adding to them that anyone who disagrees with the genocide charge is a “residential school denialist,” a term it claims is equivalent to Holocaust denial.
“The pain of denialism is deeply offensive and compounds the suffering that generations of survivors have already endured and has no place in public discourse,” it also asserted. This charge implies that Grave Error should be removed from distribution.
No mention is made of the intense pain and suffering the false accusations that thousands of missing children are buried in unmarked graves, many the victims of genocide, have caused.
The UBCIC is no outlier in accepting a narrative that bloomed only after the Kamloops announcement. But regardless of how many times it’s repeated by Indigenous leaders, political activists, academics, and media commentators, it’s either grossly exaggerated or completely false, as shown not only by the contents of Grave Error, a volume none of its critics seem to have read let alone subjected to intense analysis, a book that reports the results of meticulous historical research conducted by dozens of courageous scholars and other objective writers, revealing the Kamloops scandal and others like it as perhaps the largest hoax Canada has ever seen.
This careful research has shown no “missing children” who were “forced to attend” residential schools; instead, their largely voluntary attendance was carefully recorded from registration to completion. The suggestion that missing children were murdered by school personnel after being subjected to physical and sex9ual abuse or even outright torture has also been exposed as an undocumented blood libel. No human remains have been located using ground-penetrating radar at any former Indian Residential School save for persons buried in known but forgotten cemeteries.
As Tom Flanagan has written in summarizing Grave Error’s key findings:
The truth is that there are no “missing children.” The fate of some children may have been forgotten with the passage of generations – forgotten by their own families, that is. But “forgotten” is not the same as “missing.” The myth of missing students arose from a failure of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s researchers to cross-reference the vast number of historical documents about residential schools and the children who attended them. This documentation exists, but the Commissioners did not avail themselves of it.
As the contributor of three chapters to Grave Error, I recommend that municipal leaders pause until they have read Grave Error and made up their own minds.
Grave Error has over 800 reviews on the Amazon Books website, averaging 4.6 stars out of 5. The collection is ranked first on three Amazon lists and has been a best-seller since it was published last January.
One of the top Amazon reviews begins, “A well-researched, non-partisan and balanced approach to the hysterical outpourings of recent years.” Another review says, “There is not one whiff of racism or hatred in this book.”
To once more quote Flanagan:
Grave Error is a collection of some of the best pushback essays published by these brave researchers in response to the Kamloops mythology. They analyze and critique the false narrative of unmarked graves, missing children, forced attendance and genocidal conditions at Indian Residential Schools. The book’s title summarizes the authors’ view of the Kamloops narrative. It is wrong. And not just wrong, but egregiously wrong. Because of this, it fully deserves our sardonic title, which normally might have more in common with a tabloid newspaper headline. Our book shows in detail just why and where the narrative is wrong.
“A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” my sardonic take on the UBCIC resolution, is just as deserving.
As for True North and Dorchester Books, kudos to their proprietors for the courage and honesty to publish this groundbreaking collection of articles.
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
For additional sources critical of the unmarked graves claim, check out:
From Truth Comes Reconciliation: Assessing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report by Rodney Clifton
Indian Residential School Records
Indian Residential Schools Research Group
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