No more apologies. Former Residential School should be declared crime scenes. Now is a time for justice - By Grahame Russell 

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No more apologies. Former Residential School should be declared crime scenes
Now is a time for justice
By Grahame Russell, Rights Action, June 11, 2021
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Crimes committed against First Nations children in Canada’s Residential Schools system include physical abuse, torture, sexual abuse, criminal negligence resulting in death by malnutrition, disease and accident, desecration of the dead, and more.

The Residential Schools system itself should be considered a component of multi-generational government policies that amount to the crimes of ethnocide and genocide. These policies predate the formation of Canada in 1867, and were a fundamental part of European imperialism and colonialism.


Apologies are not an appropriate response.

What is needed are much more truth-telling. Needed are criminal investigations and trials against the individual wrong-doers in the Residential Schools, and against the policy makers in the government and church institutions.

Without full truth about what happened, without criminal investigations and trials against the responsible individuals, institutions and governments, without legally mandated reparations (including binding land back processes), and without fundamental reforms of the underlying values, laws and policies that led to so many crimes against First Nations peoples and communities, apologies can be worse than saying nothing, burying the truth and crimes under further layers of misinformation, denial and impunity.

Criminal justice processes and gravesite exhumations
Based on historic and current evidence available, why would all former Residential Schools across Canada not be declared crimes scenes?

Criminal investigations would be then initiated into the commission of crimes at the Residential Schools. These investigations might necessitate the exhuming of individual and collective gravesites located on former Residential School properties. The possible exhumation of gravesites is a deeply serious undertaking and would need the approval and blessing of surviving family and community members.

Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, [link removed]

With the forensic and anthropological expertise available in Canada (and in Guatemala, as discussed below), examination of the remains would aim to identify the age and sex of the remains, the identity of the person (including the use of DNA testing with surviving family members), and the cause of death.

Investigations would include subpoenaing all relevant government and church documents. They would include on-the-record interviews with Residential School survivors, family and community members, members of churches and government officials responsible for the planning and implementation of the Residential School program, expert witness, etc.

Based on the findings, prosecutors would then decide whether or not to file criminal charges against individuals from governments and churches for individual crimes and for the systemic crime of the Residential Schools system.

Experience of Indigenous Mayan peoples in Guatemala: Empowering truth-telling and justice processes
It may be instructive and empowering for First Nations families and communities that have suffered the violence, harms and destruction of Residential Schools, and who may have loved ones buried in unmarked graves on Residential School sites, to learn about the experiences of Mayan families and communities that have accompanied the work of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG, [link removed]) in the process of exhuming mass graves wherein lie the remains of their killed and disappeared loved ones.

Historic Memory
For 30 years, the FAFG has been exhuming (digging up) individual and mass graves wherein lie the remains of victims of genocides, massacres and disappearances planned and carried out by successive U.S.-backed Guatemalan military regimes over the course of decades, most particularly from 1975-1985.

The vast majority of the victims were Mayan people.

Working closely with family and community members, the FAFG has carried out hundreds of exhumations across Guatemala, identifying when possible the age, sex and identity of the victims, and cause of death.

The forensically examined and respectfully preserved remains of the victims have been at the center of powerful truth-telling and legal processes in Guatemala, including crimes against humanity and genocide trials.

Family and community centered process
Respecting the parameters and demands of legal investigations, the FAFG prioritizes the needs, spiritual practices and healing processes of surviving family member and community at every step of the exhumations, from the initial identification of a possible gravesite through to the formal returning of the remains to family and community members so that they may finally properly bury their loved ones.

Healing and empowerment through truth-telling and justice processes
The exhumation process in Guatemala is the most important component of truth-telling and justice work in the country. For surviving family and community members, accompanying the exhumation process has been fundamental to their healing and to the re-empowerment of surviving family and community members of the victims.

In many cases, surviving family and community members have continued on to seek justice in the courts.

Individual and systemic crimes
If there is the moral and political will necessary in Canada to pursue justice for Residential School crimes against First Nations peoples, individual crimes will be easier to identify: physical abuse, torture, sexual abuse, criminal negligence resulting in death by malnutrition, disease and accident, desecration of the dead, etc.

In pursuing justice, however, it will be vital for prosecutors to investigate the Residential Schools system itself as one policy/ program of broader historic processes and crimes of ethnocide and genocide against First Nations peoples, that began during centuries of Christian-led, European imperialism and colonialism, and continued after the creation of the settler colonialist country of Canada.

Putting the legal system itself on trial
If done properly, investigations into crimes committed at Residential Schools would be, in a very real sense, a trial of the colonialist and Canadian legal systems that, for generations, rendered legal the policies and programs of imperialism, colonialism and settler colonialism – including the Residential Schools system.

Over the past decades, the Canadian government has called for and supported criminal investigations and trials around the world – including the establishment of ad hoc international tribunals – for crimes against humanity, genocides and systemic crimes of human rights violations.

Will our various levels of government, our dominant political parties, media and Christian churches have the honesty, humility and political will necessary to call for and support these types criminal investigations and justice processes here in Canada?

Need for a ‘media truth commission investigation’
Over the past 2 weeks, since the “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves of First Nations children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, countless journalists and public commentators have expressed dismay, asking how could we not know?
Photo: Steve Russell / Toronto Star. Kayla Sutherland compared the statue’s removal to a ceremony. She said her grandmother went to a residential school, and she has never been able to access records about the school or what happened there. [link removed]
Over the past few years, while reporting on the findings the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on the “highway of tears”, on the “60’s scoop”, on other foster home programs, on violence against Indigenous women, on the reservation pass system, etc., journalists and commentators have regularly asked how could we not have known?

It strikes me as bitterly ironic that people in the media ask how did we not know?

Firstly, who is the we in the question? First Nations people have known all along what was being done to them, and by whom. Secondly, will we continue to pretend that the policy makers and program implementers did not know what they were doing?

Perhaps now is the time not only for comprehensive criminal investigations and trials, but also a full investigation into the role of the mainstream media in reporting on so-called First Nations issues, going back to before Canada was created as a country in 1867, through to today.

The formation of such a media truth commission could be challenging. Who investigates the investigators? Who reports on the reporters? How can such an investigation be far-reaching enough to get at the underlying historic truths? What would be the mandate, procedures and timeframe?

Yet, with the appropriate humility, honesty and political will, such an inquiry is clearly doable and would, I believe, go a long way to demonstrating how the media, in complex and varying ways over many generations, helped propagate and justify the ideological and intellectual underpinnings of imperialism and colonialism, and then of the settler colonialist state of Canada since 1867, including the planning and carrying out of ethnocidal and genocidal policies and programs such as the Residential Schools.

Land Back
The fundamental underlying goal and policy of imperialism and colonialism, and then of Canada since 1867, has been (and continues to be in important ways) the illegal, sometimes violent dispossession of land.

Land theft, based on the removal, destruction and/or “de-Indianization” of First Nations peoples of these lands now called Canada, is what centuries of western European imperialism, colonialism and settler colonialism was always about.

History cannot be changed. How history is collectively understood and addressed through truth-telling and justice processes has everything to do with how we go forward as individuals and peoples living in this place called Canada.

How to reconcile what was never ‘conciled’ in the first place?
A brief return to Guatemala, where the Mayan peoples have suffered, survived and resisted centuries of comparable land dispossession, ethnocide and genocide.

On April 28, 1998, two days after the Catholic Church published its “REMHI report” (Recovery of the Historical Memory) documenting decades of U.S.-backed repression and genocide mainly against the Mayan peoples of Guatemala, assassins killed Bishop Juan Gerardi, the 75-year-old director of the REMHI project. They bashed in his skull and left his body on the street outside his church.

On a number of occasions in the mid-1990s, Bishop Juan Gerardi, a long-time advocate for human rights, Indigenous rights and justice in Guatemala, explained to visiting human rights delegations of U.S. and Canadian citizens:

“In Guatemala, we should not talk of reconciliation between the dominant ladino population and the impoverished, oppressed Mayan majority. How can we reconcile that which was never ‘conciled’ in the first place?”

Will Canada honestly name and acknowledge its past?
As Canada confronts the “discovery” of the unmarked graves on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, and the fact that there are unmarked graves on many former Residential Schools across Canada, will Canadians and our institutions (government and legal systems), our religious institutions, and our media, offer up more apologies and perhaps compensation funds, and then try and put this behind us and ‘get back to normal’?

Or will Canadians, our governments and legal systems, our religious institutions and media properly name and acknowledge our past, including centuries of ethnocide, genocide and massive land theft, including the Residential Schools system, and will Canada support far-reaching truth-telling and justice processes necessary so as to reform, transform and build a fair and just country – for the first time - going forward?

(Grahame Russell is, since 1995, director of Rights Action. He is a non-practicing Canadian lawyer and adjunct professor at University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC). With Professor Catherine Nolin, Grahame is co-editor of “Testimonio: Canadian Mining in the Aftermath of Genocides in Guatemala”, to be published by Between the Lines in October 2021, [link removed].)

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More information
Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (www.fafg.org ([link removed]) )
* “A forensic anthropologist who brings closure for the "disappeared", TED Talk, November 2014, [link removed]
* “Guatemala’s Disappeared”, AL Jazeera Fault Lines film (25 minutes), [link removed]
* “The cold cases of Guatemala’s civil war were impossible to identify—until now”, National Geographic, December 19, 2019, [link removed]
* “The Secrets in Guatemala’s Bones”, New York Times Magazine, July 3, 2016, [link removed]

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