National Day for Truth and Reconciliation delegitimizes truth. So do attempts to criminalize “residential school denialism”
Today is Canada’s “National Day for Truth and Reconciliation,” a statutory holiday in many parts of the country.
A growing cohort of informed Canadians will see this day as one of countless federal government virtue signaling-cum-propaganda efforts meant to obscure, deny, or hide the truth about our country’s interaction with its indigenous people, notably the role played in this interaction by the Indian Residential Schools, a noble albeit flawed and occasionally harmful effort to help Canada’s first settlers adapt to the challenges of a rapidly modernizing country, an effort the historical record shows indigenous people and their leaders strongly embraced.
Today is also four short days after a reprehensible censorship motion by Leah Gazan, the NDP Member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre, presented in a private member’s bill, criminalizing residential school “denialism” — defined as “downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada” — as reported on September 26 by the National Post.
Her bill rides on the back of a Liberal government amendment to its 2022 budget implementation bill that added a criminal provision against making public statements that promote antisemitism “by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.”
In short, Gazan sees Canada’s generally benevolent treatment of children attending the indigenous boarding schools, a set of institutions where not a single verified murder of students took place, as equivalent to the Nazi murder of six million Jews before and during the Second World War.
Gazan confirmed in an interview last Thursday that she drew inspiration from the existing provision — which has yet to see any charges or prosecutions — saying she wants to see the “genocide” of residential schools given the same status.
But the Holocaust amendment was not needed, given existing hate-crime legislation. Moreover, as of last November, the federal Justice Department said it was unaware of any charges or prosecutions being laid under that offence. British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec, and Alberta said they had no charges or cases on record, so the law's constitutionality has never been tested.
Gazan is of mixed descent. Her mother was a Chinese and Lakota woman and her father a Jewish Holocaust survivor. She said the history of genocide on one side of her family “is never up for debate.”
Her words say she also wants no debate on the charge of an indigneous genocide that never occurred.
“That is not true for Indigenous People of Canada,” she said on Thursday. “I cannot think of anything more violent to survivors and their family members and community to constantly have their history with genocide up for debate.”
“If this country is serious about reconciling it has to come to terms with some of our history and take the actions necessary to protect those that are most impacted by it.”
Gazan seems so painfully ignorant of “some of our history” that she may truly believe the aboriginal people of Canada suffered a Nazi-style genocide.
If passed, Gazan’s private member’s bill would make it a criminal offence to willfully promote hatred against indigenous people “by condoning, denying, justifying or downplaying the harm caused by the residential school system in Canada.”
In her speech to the House of Commons after tabling it, she said, “All parliamentarians must stand firm against all forms of damaging hate speech, including the denial of the tragedy of the residential schools in Canada.”
If they were all still alive, of the children voluntarily sent to the residential schools from loving homes undamaged by orphanhood, horrific child abuse, or outright abandonment — a cohort representing a small fraction of the children attending these boarding schools during their last four or five decades — would vigorously challenge her assertions.
Though the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, established to investigate the residential school system, heard from thousands of former students who testified about experiencing physical, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse, as well as malnutrition, it failed to even superficially interrogate these claims or determine whether such so-called survivors arrived at the schools already severely damaged by their troubled home experience on impoverished and dysfunctional Indian reserves.
Recall also that last fall, Gazan tabled a motion calling on members of Parliament to recognize the residential school system as a genocide. This motion received unanimous consent from Parliament without any committee study or debate.
Last Thursday, she told the National Post that she respects free speech but that “all rights have limitations.”
“There’s a difference between freedom of speech and hate speech,” Gazan said, adding the abuses perpetrated on indigenous children are irrefutable.
Presumably, these irrefutable abuses include the vast majority never prosecuted, let alone proven in a court of law. The presumed assumption held by Gazan and legions of mindless indigenous activists like her is that Canada’s aboriginal people — unlike every other ethnic group in the world — never embellish or lie about their alleged suffering or other adversities, including their life experiences in the residential schools.
More particularly, Gazan refuses to acknowledge that only a handful of these reported abuses have been tested and verified in a court of law or that they are overwhelmed by stories of happy and rewarding school life, as shown in the references below.
This elementary evidentiary defect did not prevent Chantalle Aubertin, a spokeswoman for Justice Minister Arif Virani, from claiming:
“We must not ignore the lasting impact these schools had on Indigenous peoples — an intergenerational trauma that continues to be deeply felt today. The denial of the atrocities that occurred remains painful for survivors, their families, and communities.”
Whatever “intergeneration trauma that continues to be felt today” has little or nothing to do with the boarding schools. Rather, it is a product of the incomplete integration into the larger Canadian society of indigenous people despite 500 years of contact with Western civilization. In particular, the Indian Residential Schools failed to destroy indigenous cultures because they did not systematically or wholeheartedly try to do so and because no more than one-third of Status Indian children attended for an average of 4.5 years. Nearly all but orphans returned home on weekends if their homes were nearby or for extended Christmas and summer holidays, where they continued to internalize and practice their traditional ways of life.
As for the parliamentary opposition, Conservative MP Jamie Schmale said in a statement last Thursday that his party would “closely examine” the bill.
“The residential school system is a dark chapter of our nation’s history. In 2008, the Canadian government under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered an apology finally acknowledging the horrors of the residential school system,” Schmale said.
There is no body of reliable evidence showing that those children who attended residential schools and their descendants were left worse off emotionally or in other ways than those with no residential school history.
The true horror is that one-third of Status Indian children, corresponding to only one-fifth of all indigenous children, attended no school at all during the period the residential schools were operating under government control and funding, 1883-1996.
As expected, Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse posted on X that she supports the bill.
“Each political party should be in support of this bill,” she added.
As for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the following statement comes directly from the Government of Canada and implicitly supports Gazan’s parliamentary efforts.
National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
The day honours the children who never returned home and Survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities. Public commemoration of the tragic and painful history and ongoing impacts of residential schools is a vital component of the reconciliation process.
Both the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day take place on September 30.
Orange Shirt Day is an Indigenous-led grassroots commemorative day intended to raise awareness of the individual, family and community inter-generational impacts of residential schools, and to promote the concept of “Every Child Matters”. The orange shirt is a symbol of the stripping away of culture, freedom and self-esteem experienced by Indigenous children over generations.
On September 30, we encourage all Canadians to wear orange to honour the thousands of Survivors of residential schools.
Despite the lack of evidence supporting these inflammatory assertions, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, still colloquially known as Orange Shirt Day, has been institutionalized as a Canadian holiday promoting a one-sided picture of the legacy of the Canadian Indian residential school system.
Orange Shirt Day was first established as an observance in 2023, two years after a notorious announcement from British Columbia’s Kamloops Indian Band on May 27, 2021 (see below), part of a well-organized effort to promote a highly negative and thoroughly distorted awareness of the residential school system and its alleged impact on indigenous communities. The propaganda effort has been so successful that the residential school system has been recognized as a genocide by many commentators other than Gazan.
But it is genocide without a single murdered child.
As for the use of an orange shirt as a symbolic expression of alleged Indian Residential school atrocities, it was inspired by the accounts of Phyllis Jack Webstad, whose personal clothing — including a new orange shirt — she claimed was taken from her during her first day of residential schooling and never returned. The orange shirt is thus used as a symbol of the alleged forced assimilation of Indigenous children that the residential school system is said to have enforced.
The day was elevated to a statutory holiday for federal workers and workers in federally-regulated workplaces by the Parliament of Canada in 2021 and named "National Day for Truth and Reconciliation" despite the unverified claim that thousands of unmarked graves containing the remains of children lie near former residential school sites.
Today — Monday, September 30 — is the fourth observance of the federal National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, a statutory holiday in many parts of Canada.
Let’s remember how this commemoration of “children who never made it home from their residential schools” came into being, namely the “discovery” of the unmarked graves of indigenous children on the Kamloops Indian Reserve in British Columbia as announced on May 27, 2021.
This revelation rocked the country to its core, with many Indigenous organizations and media outlets falsely reporting the existence of “mass graves” in Canada as proof that genocide had been committed against aboriginal children. Such claims were primarily driven by indigenous groups, not by the media, yet another widespread falsehood, along with the falsehood that thousands of indigenous children died on the property of their boarding schools and then unceremoniously dumped into unmarked mass graves next to the school.
These falsehoods — along with others comprehensively exposed here, here, here, here, and here — are grounded in the baseline one promoted in the May 2021 media release of the Kamloops band:
May 27, 2021, Kamloops – It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
As is now well known by anyone more convinced by scientific truth than emotion-based and rent-seeking propaganda, there was no “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” then and none since because ground penetrating radar cannot verify the existence of human remains and because no excavation of the site in question has been permitted.
As is also well known, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and Orange Shirt Day have been merged.
As a reminder of the symbolism and politics of this merger, I once more freely offer the compelling piece below, first reposted on this site on the eve of the third anniversary of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. It was written by gifted researcher and essayist Nina Green and shows that The Orange Shirt Story is yet another Indigenous falsehood, part of a pattern that increasingly reveals “Indigenous knowings” as fictional and “Indigenous knowledge keepers” as fake horror stories peddlers.
It's too bad for Canadians that this horror story peddling has beguiled Leah Gazan.
Behind the Orange Shirt
Nina Green
Dorchester Review
September 28, 2023
Phyllis Webstad's The Orange Shirt Story, published in 2018, is in school libraries across Canada. The cover depicts young Phyllis in an orange shirt confronted by two black-habited Catholic nuns, one with scissors in her hand, the other clutching a rosary behind her back. Inside the book, illustrations show four black-habited nuns greeting her outside the school, a nun removing her orange shirt, a nun cutting her hair, and a nun hovering over her while she prays at bedtime. The text states that the nuns made her shower, took her orange shirt away, gave her other clothes to wear, and cut her hair short.
This was a routine procedure when children arrived at residential schools across Canada in September. In his book From Truth Comes Reconciliation, Rodney Clifton, who worked at Stringer Hall, the Anglican student residence and hostel in Inuvik, explains that it was a practical necessity for the students’ health and well-being. He noted that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report failed to state that:
Some of the children arrived at Stringer Hall in September wearing the same school clothing they wore when they went home in the spring, not having bathed or changed in two months. Some of these children had been standing in smudge fires, trying to escape the hordes of blood-sucking insects, and a number had arrived with infected bug bites on their scalps. A few children arrived with ear infections so severe that pus was running down their necks. At the beginning of the year, these children cried themselves to sleep. As you might expect, the first priority of the residential school staff, particularly the nursing sister, was to clean up the children, and treat their infections.
To put the students’ living conditions and infections into context, anyone reading this account needs to realize that it wasn’t until the early 1950s that a weekly bath with a change of clothes became the norm for most urban Canadians. For people living on farms and in small communities where water had to be hand-pumped from wells and heated on coal and wood stoves, a bath with a change of clothing was a luxury reserved for special occasions. In the North, it was even more difficult to bathe and change clothing, especially for the children who were with their parents in tents at hunting and fishing camps.
There is little doubt that the hostel children appreciated ending a busy week with a hot shower, clean pajamas, and a chance to slip between clean sheets in their very own beds, just as other Canadian children did. (pp. 281-2)
The Orange Shirt Story does not provide this much-needed context, and makes it appear that giving Phyllis Webstad and other children from remote Indian reserves in the Cariboo a shower, a change of clothing, and a haircut on their arrival at St. Joseph's in September were callous acts perpetrated by 'cold and unfriendly' nuns.
How many nuns were actually at St Joseph’s during the 1973/4 school year?
The fact that Phyllis Webstad puts nuns at centre-stage on the cover and in the text and illustrations of The Orange Shirt Story contrasts rather markedly with her failure to mention nuns in her other accounts of her year at St. Joseph’s, which, to clarify, was no longer a school when she arrived there in 1973, but a student residence or hostel in which students lived while attending public schools in town in Williams Lake.
As the federal government’s policy of integrating status Indian students into provincial public schools and turning the former residential schools into student residences or hostels progressed during the 1950s and 1960s, nuns were no longer required as teachers, and many had left by the time the federal government formally took over administration of the schools from the churches on 1 April 1969. Thus, if there were still a few non-teaching nuns working alongside lay staff at St Joseph’s residence/hostel during Phyllis Webstad’s one-year stay there in 1973/4, it does seem a rather glaring omission that she never specifically mentions nuns in other accounts of her life there.
In a subsequent book, Beyond The Orange Shirt Story, published in 2021, she merely refers to the persons who took away her orange shirt as ‘them’:
I can remember arriving at the Mission. The building was huge, unlike any building I’d ever seen before. I remember lots of crying and the feeling of terror, pee your pants terror! When my clothing, including my orange shirt, was taken, it didn’t matter how much I protested or told them I wanted it back, they didn’t listen.
On the Orange Shirt Society webpage, she merely says ‘they’:
I went to the Mission for one school year in 1973/1974. I had just turned 6 years old. I lived with my grandmother on the Dog Creek reserve. We never had very much money, but somehow my granny managed to buy me a new outfit to go to the Mission school. I remember going to Robinson’s store and picking out a shiny orange shirt. It had string laced up in front, and was so bright and exciting – just like I felt to be going to school!
When I got to the Mission, they stripped me, and took away my clothes, including the orange shirt! I never wore it again. I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t give it back to me, it was mine!
In a recent CBC Kids article and interview, she merely says ‘staff’':
But once she got to the school, Webstad said staff took away her clothes, including her orange shirt. She never had the chance to wear it again.
Why does Phyllis Webstad shy away in subsequent accounts from stating that it was nuns who took her orange shirt away when she had stated so emphatically in The Orange Shirt Story that nuns were responsible?
In that regard, it may be significant that in Beyond The Orange Shirt Story, Phyllis Webstad mentions Gloria Manuel, an Indigenous staff member who she says was kind to her:
I remember that a Native woman who worked there was kind to me. She had long hair and a loving face. At the time I didn’t know her name, but since then, I’ve met her again and have learned her name is Gloria Manuel.
In fact, there were many Indigenous staff throughout the years of the residential school system. The schools couldn’t have run without them. In 1961, 8.9% of the total teaching staff were Indigenous. 96 status Indian teachers were employed in day schools, and 25 in residential schools. Those figures, of course, do not include the many hundreds of Indigenous staff members like Gloria Manuel who were employed in other capacities in the schools over the years.
The foregoing facts raise an obvious question: Was it actually lay staff members, and perhaps even Indigenous lay staff members, who gave Phyllis Webstad a shower and haircut, and took her orange shirt away when she arrived at St Joseph's? If so, The Orange Shirt Story has clearly misinformed the Canadian public, and in particular, Canadian schoolchildren.
It’s even possible that Phyllis Webstad’s orange shirt was eventually returned to her. She can’t say for certain that it wasn’t, because she admits to having no memory of going home at the end of the school year.
I don’t have a memory of getting my shirt back, or going home when school was out.
There are other aspects of Phyllis Webstad’s story about which the public has not been accurately informed. For example, the CBC Kids article erroneously states that she attended school at St Joseph’s:
In 1973, when Webstad was six years old, she started attending St. Joseph's Mission Residential School near Williams Lake.
As noted above, the CBC is in error. St. Joseph’s was no longer a school when Phyllis Webstad arrived there. It was a student residence and hostel where students lived while attending public school in Williams Lake:
The Mission was the place where we slept and ate. When I attended in 1973, there were 272 students in total, boys and girls. All of the students were bussed into Williams Lake to attend public school, about 20 minutes away. ... I liked my teacher there, she had crazy red curly hair, she smelled good, and she was kind — I wished she could take me home with her.
Moreover it seems Phyllis Webstad’s experience in public school In Williams Lake was a pleasant one. She has positive memories of it. Her teacher, Lynn Eberts, has positive memories as well; she wrote in Beyond The Orange Shirt Story:
It was a very happy group of children in that primary classroom. We had a great year!
A horrific experience?
Phyllis Webstad has been telling her story for a decade:
Ten years ago, Phyllis Webstad spoke about her residential school experience in front of an audience of residential school survivors in Williams Lake, British Columbia.
From there, Orange Shirt Day was born. Since then, it has grown into a cross-Canada movement.
People mark Orange Shirt Day on Sept. 30 by wearing orange.
During that decade, Canadians have come to believe that Phyllis Webstad’s experience at St Joseph’s was a horrific one. In fact, in the CBC Kids interview, Phyllis Webstad herself used the word ‘horrific’, and she has on some occasions made horrific claims based on hearsay, not on the basis of what she herself experienced as a six-year-old in 1973/4.
But in believing that Phyllis Webstad had a horrific experience at St. Joseph’s, have Canadians been deceived? Her detailed account in Beyond The Orange Shirt Story reveals nothing which would justify the use of the word ‘horrific’. She missed the grandmother who had raised her, which is understandable. She obviously did not miss her parents, who had both abandoned her. She did not know who her white father was until long after she became an adult, and she says she never lived with her mother. But at St. Joseph’s she had her cousin as a companion, and it seems she had a happy school year with a teacher she liked. And at the end of that one year, she went home, never to return to St. Joseph’s again.
In contrast, life for children living on the Dog Creek Reserve could be truly horrific. In Beyond The Orange Shirt Story, Phyllis’ aunt, Theresa Jack, writes:
There was lots of violence and drinking on the reserve. Many times at Granny Suzanne’s, we had to hide ourselves for our safety, usually in the sweat house or the haystack by the creek. My two uncles lived with us. One of them abused me sexually, and the other abused me mentally and physically. He would beat me and my brother with sticks and anything he could get his hands on. He even bullwhipped us once.
So which experience merits the epithet ‘horrific' — Phyllis Webstad's year living at St. Joseph’s while attending public school in Williams Lake in a class of ‘very happy’ children taught by a teacher she liked, or her aunt Theresa Jack's experience of drunkenness and violence, and being beaten, bullwhipped, and sexually, physically and mentally abused by her uncles on the Dog Creek Reserve?
Phyllis Webstad needs to level with Canadians, and tell them (1) whether it really was nuns who greeted her at the school, forced her to shower, took her orange shirt away, and cut her hair, or whether it was lay staff members, and perhaps Indigenous lay staff members, (2) that her school year with a teacher she liked in Williams Lake was a happy one, (3) that her parents had both abandoned her, and that she had no one to care for her on the reserve apart from an aging grandmother, and (4) that childhood on the reserve, as experienced by her aunt, was horrific, as opposed to her own year at St. Joseph’s, which was not horrific at all.
Nina Green is a regular contributor to The Dorchester Review.
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One correction: It is not accurate to say that 1/3 of indigenous children attended residential schools. It is accurate to state that 1/3 of status Indian children attended residential schools. “Indigenous” includes Métis, non-status etc. Thus, the fraction of indigenous attending was more like 1/5. Although some Métis found their way into residential schools, federal policy was to deny them admission. The federal government always insisted that Métis were the responsibility of the provinces
The full court press surrounding this 'holiday' reminds me of the propaganda efforts connected with Covid, Climate & Renewable energy. Despite logic, evidence & sincere questioning, the non-believers get shouted down, denigrated & soon may be sent to the gulag. My feeling is the Native leaders jumped the shark with the murdered children script. With zero evidence of murder/bodies and none forthcoming, there's a growing backlash developing.