The following piece first appeared in the Woke Watch Canada newsletter and is re-posted below with no paywall.
Written by star researcher Nina Green, also publisher and editor of Indian Residential School Records, the premier internet repository housing historical material about Canada’s Indian Residential Schools never sought or revealed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the countries boarding schools for indigenous children, it is a carefully documented case study illustrating the incompatibility between the unchallenged and unproven testimonies of so-called Indian Residential School “Survivors” — a word always capitalized and always referring to any former student regardless of their school experience — and the historical facts informing those testimonies.
In short, Ms. Green presents us with yet another example of the increasingly recognized contest between indigenous knowings and scientific knowledge, the former based on oral myths, legends, and tall tales, the later on written records and other documents produced at the exact time the events or actions described took place.
Which body of knowings is more accurate and credible?
Should We Believe Survivors? When records contradict stories
Nina Green
Woke Watch Canada
March 19, 2024
Can Canadians believe Survivors without independent verification?
That's a very important question for all of us.
Let's look at one of the very first Survivor stories to receive national attention through Kevin Annett (who later influenced Jim Prentice through Member of Parliament Gary Merasty).
In 1995, Harriet Nahanee, then 60 years old, told Karen Gram of the Vancouver Sun that when she was eleven, she had witnessed the principal of the Alberni Indian Residential School, the Reverend Albert Caldwell, kick a 6-year-old student down the stairs to her death. See the attached article from the Vancouver Sun.
Three years later, in 1998, Harriet Nahanne told attendees at a Simon Fraser University campus event in downtown Vancouver that the murdered student's name was Maisie Shaw.
For thirty years, the story of Maisie Shaw's heartless murder has been publicized by Harriet Nahanne, Kevin Annett and others, and most recently on 13 June 2021 by journalist Stephen Hume, who recounted this version shortly after the false claim by the Kamloops Band that it had discovered 'the remains of 215 children':
[Maisie Shaw's] mother died when she was five. And then she went to the Alberni school.
What happened to her there is the mystery. Another former student, Harriet Nahanee, who died in 2007, said in 1995 that on December 24, 1946, when she was six, she had witnessed Maisie Shaw being kicked down a flight of stairs at the residential school and lying motionless on the floor with her eyes open and that she later died of her injuries; her body was sent back to Nitinat. [boldface added]
The problem?
None of the so-called 'facts' are correct. Maisie Shaw did not go to the Alberni Indian Residential School at the age of five when her mother died in 1937. School records show that she had been there six years when she died in 1946, and thus did not enrol until 1940, when she was eight.
Moreover Harriet Nahanne, born Harriet Jones in 1935, was eleven years old in 1946, not six years old, and Maisie Shaw's BC death certificate states that Maisie Shaw was fourteen years old when she died, not six years old. Thus Harriet Nahanne bizarrely told the Vancouver Sun in 1995 that she had witnessed the murder of a six-year-old when in fact Maisie Shaw was fourteen at the time of her death.
Even more importantly, on 24 December 1946, when Harriet Nahanne says she witnessed Maisie Shaw being murdered at the Alberni Indian Residential School, Maisie Shaw was actually in the West Coast General Hospital, where she had been under the care of Dr N.J. Jones since 18 December. (See her death certificate, signed by both Dr Jones and the Indian Agent, N.W. Garrard, which states that she died in the West Coast General Hospital on 26 December 1946 of acute rheumatic pericarditis after 8 days in the hospital.)
The tale told by Harriet Nahanne of Maisie Shaw's death, and repeated by Kevin Annett and others, is thus false in every respect.
This raises the obvious question: Can Canadians believe Survivors without subjecting their tales to independent verification?
They cannot. Survivors' stories need to be independently verified.
Nor should Canadians put any credence in the University of Manitoba's NCTR website, which lists Maisie Shaw among thousands of missing children who are not actually missing.
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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The Unknown Truth Of Canada's Residential School System and read about Nina Green’s website which features hundreds of Indian Residential School records.
We need honest researchers Like Nina, James Pew & Hymie to give context and reason to these statements. I no longer believe aboriginal people about anything. They have broken the bond that made us friends and the sad part is I always thought we were friends.
Some university should hire Nina Green as a senior researcher and she should be awarded a Canada Council grant to continue her first class scholarship.