By Hymie Rubenstein ——Bio and Archives--December 24, 2023
Canadian News, Politics | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
Over two and a half years have passed since the May 27, 2021 media release from a British Columbia Indian Reserve heard around the world announcing “ … the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” that were secretly buried in a mass grave, some or all the alleged victims of a brutal act of genocide at this and other boarding schools across the land.
But none of the gruesome stories now being endlessly repeated about happenings at Kamloops and other residential schools found their way into the pages of the six-volume Truth and Reconciliation Report written to document the history, operation, and legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, an effort that stretched over seven years and cost $72 million to research and write.
Related:
None of the Report’s 94 “Calls to Action” mention searching for children secretly buried in unmarked graves, let alone the existence of mass graves containing their remains.
A lack of verified evidence of children buried in unmarked graves, some supposedly after priests murdered them, has done nothing to deter the federal government from funding several lavish programmes controlled by the Indigenous “victims” of federal policies meant to help Aboriginal children adapt to the challenges created by their confrontation with European colonization, including the loss of traditional livelihood practices, together with their growing demand for Western goods and services.
One of these extravagant initiatives was the announcement on August 10, 2021, of the allocation of $321 million to help Indigenous communities search burial sites at former residential schools and to support survivors and their communities, confirming political scientist Frances Widdowson’s assertion that, “these allegations have resulted in the extraction of numerous forms of compensation from governments, incentivizing Indigenous organizations to enthusiastically promote them.”
The Kamloops discovery and the promise of so much money quickly unleashed a flood of similar GPR searches all across Western Canada and Ontario. To date, the locations of unmarked graves are presumed to hold the remains of more than 2,000 mainly unknown and unaccounted for individuals, primarily children, at 26 different sites since 1974. (Five of the six sites predating the Kamloops discovery are either known community cemeteries or have been shown to contain the bodies of named individuals whose wooden grave markers disintegrated over the years.)
The allocation of such funds was followed in June 2022 by appointing an investigator to work with Indigenous communities and the government to propose changes to federal laws, policies and practices related to unmarked graves at residential schools.
Kimberly Murray, former Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, was given a two-year appointment as Canada’s “independent special interlocutor for missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites associated with the Indian Residential Schools.”
Murray’s appointment was simply one part of a campaign, whether deliberately organized or not, to label Canada as a genocidal country long engaged in the systematic murder of Indigenous children whose remains were dumped into mass graves.
Perhaps the first high-ranking Indigenous official to employ the genocide label, albeit in an equivocal manner, was Assembly of First Nations National Chief Shawn Atleo who argued in October 2011 that “I, along with so many of our people, feel if you consider what the term genocide means. It references to the killing of people. Our people died in residential schools…[T]he residential school was cultural genocide; the attempt to, over the course of history, to kill the Indian in the child. And that has been the experience of our people.”
His successor, Perry Bellegarde, made a similar charge shortly after the Kamloops discovery.
Support Canada Free Press
Murray Sinclair, former chief commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has regularly made the same claim even though the Commission’s multi-volume report also uses the less inflammatory term “cultural genocide,” a politically biased synonym for the ordinary acculturation and assimilation experienced by countless immigrants when they move from one country to another, a process successfully made by millions of migrants to Canada from non-European countries since at least the mid-19th century.
Still, as Murray explained in a 2021 interview:
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission ultimately concluded that cultural genocide had been committed in the Indian Residential School system, while still hinting throughout the report that the government was guilty of more.
In 2016, federal Liberal Member of Parliament Robert-Falcon Ouellette introduced C-318, “An Act to establish Indian Residential School Reconciliation and Memorial Day.” It called for Parliament to recognize that “the actions taken to remove children from families and communities to place them in residential schools meets this (UN) definition of genocide.” Again, this explicitly referred to “cultural genocide.”
This private member’s bill didn’t reach the committee stage and was never debated or discussed in the House.
The first unmodified use of the genocide label by an influential Indigenous body occurred on June 3, 2019, where the term was employed no fewer than 72 times in the first volume of The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to describe the random murder of Aboriginal females mainly at the hands of Aboriginal males.
Though this was an egregious distortion of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau acknowledged the very next day that “I accept the findings of the report, and the issue that we have is that people are getting wrapped up in debates over a very important and powerful term. As I’ve said, we accept the finding that this was genocide.”
Fast forward to October 27, 2022, when Leah Gazan, a New Democrat member of Canada’s federal parliament and the half-Indigenous daughter of a Holocaust survivor, moved the following motion, grounded in no more than gratuitous virtue signaling:
“That, in the opinion of the House that the government must recognize what happened in Canada's Indian residential schools as genocide, as acknowledged by Pope Francis and in accordance with article II of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
While the word genocide was never heard in any of Pope Francis's addresses during his week-long trip to Canada in 2022, on his flight back to Rome on July 29, he made the offhand comment to a reporter that everything he described about the residential school system and its forced assimilation of Indigenous children amounts to genocide: "I didn't use the word genocide because it didn't come to mind but I described genocide." Given what he said during his stay, he was referring to the nebulous extra-legal term “cultural genocide.”
As for Article II of the genocide convention, the only clause remotely relevant to the residential schools is the one dealing with “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Even “remotely relevant” is an overstatement because the largely voluntary attendance of children at the Indian Residential Schools was a temporary measure for no more than 30 percent of Treaty Indians, with nearly all students save orphans or abandoned children returning to their homes on summer and other holidays. Moreover, absenteeism at these schools was high and the average length of attendance was 4.5 years, hardly enough time for total assimilation to Western lifeways.
Equally important, Gazan’s motion was presented with no supporting evidence or debate yet received unanimous consent from MPs in the House of Commons in less than a minute.
Likewise, it is beyond comprehension that no member of the House had the knowledge, let alone courage, to remind Gazan that her motion repudiated the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, an independent, permanent court of last resort Canada helped create that has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute the most serious crimes of international concern, namely genocide and crimes against humanity.
Moreover, Canada assisted in shaping the international consensus on how genocide should be handled: only living individual persons can be prosecuted, the prosecution must take place at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and no living individual person can be prosecuted for actions which preceded the coming into force of the Rome Statute on July 1, 2002.
These requirements render the House of Commons resolution not only illegitimate but clownishly laughable.
Tomorrow Part 3
View Comments
Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is editor of —REAL Indigenous Report.