Defending Hard Truths
Wednesday was National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, observed on September 30 to honor survivors of the country’s Indian Residential School system — and the thousands of children who never came home.
According to the national Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), established in 2008 to investigate federally-funded residential schools, more than 150,000 Indigenous children attended these “schools,” where they “were abused, physically and sexually” and “died … in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world.”
At least 4,141 student deaths have now been verified and commemorated in a National Student Memorial Register, and many more children are suspected to be buried in the earth around the former school sites. The TRC’s findings had been thoroughly documented and, I thought, accepted. Which is why I was so disturbed to read about a recent display of blatant denialism.
Last Sunday, 20 or 30 men wearing masks and carrying flags of the White supremacist group Second Sons Canada gathered near the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. In 2021, that school became a flashpoint after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar suggested more than 200 burial chambers around the school. In the years since, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc has become a target for residential school denialists, and on Sunday, the group of men with the flags moved to a nearby overpass and unfurled a large sign with the words: “Got Bones?”
The abhorrent statement fits into the denialist playbook — also used by climate denialists, election denialists, and others — who “flood the zone” with misleading claims, questions, half-truths, and arguments to replace accountability with confusion, writes Sean Carleton, a historian and Indigenous studies scholar. Residential school denialism is a form of political propaganda, he adds, that’s “part of a wider project to legitimize anti-Indigenous racism and defend the settler-capitalist status quo.”
It’s no surprise that Canada is witnessing growing denialism at a time when Indigenous Peoples there are starting to exercise rights that had long been denied, and revive traditional governance and cultural systems. These include the management and reacquisition of land that was seized around the same time that Indigenous children were stolen.
In the wake of Truth and Reconciliation Day, and in the lead-up to Indigenous Peoples Day in the United States — which had three times as many federally-funded Indian Boarding Schools as Canada — let’s stand with Indigenous Peoples to defend the truth, and fight denialism, on this shared path of healing.
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