Will Denying Indigenous Genocide Soon Be Punished as Hate Speech?

On October 27, 2022, Leah Gazan, a New Democrat member of Canada’s federal parliament and the half-Indigenous daughter of a Holocaust survivor, succeeded in getting the following motion unanimously passed by the House of Commons without debate and without presenting any evidence to back it up:

“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.”

Related:

• Dissecting Canada’s Indigenous Genocide and Mass Grave Libels
• Challenging the Claim that Canada is a Genocidal Nation
• Will Denying Indigenous Genocide Soon Be Punished as Hate Speech?

According to Gazan Denying genocide is a form of hate speech

Not content with getting that spurious motion passed, Gazan raised the bar in February 2023 by proposing the enactment of legislation to criminalize denial that genocide took place at these residential schools, an even more illegitimate effort than false genocide charges given Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms protection of unpopular speech along with the absence of evidence of even a single Indian Residential School child murdered by a staff member during the 113 years the schools were government-funded institutions.

According to Gazan, “Denying genocide is a form of hate speech …. That kind of speech is violent and re-traumatizes those who attended residential school."

Always eager to label Canada a genocidal nation, the former federal minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller, quickly said he would be interested in reviewing any proposed legislation.

"Residential school denialism attempts to hide the horrors that took place in these institutions," Miller's office told CBC News.

"It seeks to deny survivors and their families the truth, and distorts Canadians' understanding of our shared history."

A recent episode in this saga occurred on June 16, 2023, when special interlocutor on the missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites, Kimberly Murray released her interim report arguing “urgent consideration” should be given to legal mechanisms to combat residential school denialism.

Unsurprisingly, her “opening words” to the report state, "my role is to give voice to the children. It is not to be neutral or objective – it is to be a fierce and fearless advocate to ensure that the bodies and Spirits of the missing children are treated with the care, respect, and dignity that they deserve” even if that “conflicts with my responsibility to function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent way.”

This attack on the fundamental precepts of objective search for truth based on reason, logic, and scientific evidence – rooted in a paradigm clash between Western and Indigenous ways of knowing – gave her leave to label denialism as an “attack” whenever there were announcements of the discovery of possible unmarked graves.

Moral certainty based on Indigenous ways of knowing, not objective evidence based on Western science

“This [sic] violence is prolific,” the report said. “And takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations.”

She offered several examples of this “violence,” including one that followed the May 2021 burial announcement by the Kamloops Indian Band with individuals entering the secured site itself: “Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there. Denialists also attacked the community on social media.”

This assertion was made with no independent evidence or proof that the shovel bearers were not themselves Kamloops band members curious about at a site that was enclosed by a chain-link fence soon after the discovery was made. This prompted investigative journalist Terry Glavin to argue that:

There was no report of this to the RCMP. We are not invited to know when this happened or to whom these interlopers explained their wicked intentions or who they might have been, exactly. We are simply expected to believe it in the same way Murray’s report asks us to believe the Tk’emlups’ community initially intended to simply fence off the old apple orchard where a ground-penetrating radar survey detected anomalies that were presumed to be graves, so that certain former residential school students, “the ones that buried the children” in the first place, could come and pay their respects.

What? There are people still alive who were among the students in those lurid stories about children being woken up in the middle of the night to bury their classmates? Who are these people? Can we speak to them? Have they spoken to the police?

Moral certainty based on Indigenous ways of knowing, not objective evidence based on Western science, allowed Kimberly Murray to state Canada has a role in combatting this denialism by giving “urgent consideration” to what legal tools exist to address the problem, including civil and criminal sanctions.

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“They have the evidence. The photos of burials. The records that prove that kids died. It is on their shoulders,” Murray told a crowd gathered on the Cowessess Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan on June 16.

But there is no photographic evidence of IRS children buried beside the shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential Schools nor at any other former Indigenous schools in Canada.

The only photographic evidence available are of regular church burials and of thousands of happy school children. As for the records, they show that the few residential school children who died at the schools were buried in school cemeteries beside buried school staff or in reserve cemeteries belonging to other bands. But most deceased children were interred on their home reserves instead. All received a proper Christian burial after succumbed to a contagious disease like tuberculosis over which Indigenous people have little natural immunity.

Several contrarians have long argued that there are few truly missing students, only lost or missing records about their school attendance and demise. On March 21, 2023, Kimberly Murray, perhaps inadvertently, confirmed this assertion in her testimony before the federal government Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples when she said:

“The family doesn’t know where their loved one is buried. They were taken to a sanatorium, an Indian residential school. They were just told … that they died. I can get the name of that individual, [of so-called missing children], I can log into the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, find the name of the student, find a record, which will lead me down to another record, which will lead me to Ancestry.com. Why are families having to go to my office to find the death certificate of their loved one on ancestry.com when the provinces and territories won’t just provide those records?

Though there is no evidence that thousands of children’s deaths were unreported to their parents

“And then those records will lead you to where they’re buried, hundreds of miles away from their home community. We are now seeing families going to cemeteries. I get this a lot. The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried. Every Indigenous family needs to know where their child is buried. When we find that and we know that they’re going to have a little bit closure now, they know the truth and they have some answers, that’s what keeps us going.” [emphasis added].

Though there is no evidence that thousands of children’s deaths were unreported to their parents – and lots of evidence that this is not true, including the refusal of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to remove children whose cause of death and place of burial have been found from its Memorial Register, a list now totalling over 4,100 named and unnamed “children who never returned home from residential schools” – Murray’s statement contradicts the established public narrative about missing children.

Justice Minister David Lametti, who appointed Murray to her role and joined the June 16 event in Cowessess First Nation via video conference, bending a knee like other Liberal apparatchiks to every Indigenous whim and fancy regardless of how illogical or groundless they may be, said that he is open to all possibilities of fighting residential-school denialism, including, “a legal solution and outlawing it.” He added that Canada can look to other countries that have criminalized Holocaust denial.

The use of state resources to promote one opinion on a scientific or historical matter is nakedly totalitarian

Looking to other countries is necessary because Holocaust denial as such is not illegal in Canada unless it can be shown to deliberately foment antisemitism. But this Liberal government has little love for legal niceties, especially regarding Indigenous demands. It is, therefore, likely that there will be an attempt to make Indian Residential School denialism a crime regardless of its motives or effects while allowing anyone to freely claim the Holocaust is a myth unless it “willfully promotes antisemitism.”

The latest anti-denialist effort emanated from the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Peoples which released a 30-page report on July 19 titled “Honouring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation.” The study recommends “that the Government of Canada take every action necessary to combat the rise of residential school denialism.”

According to lawyer John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms:

“The use of state resources to promote one opinion on a scientific or historical matter is nakedly totalitarian. Apart from that, the senators’ aggressive language calling on government to “take every action necessary” suggests that it would be okay for the government to punish the likes of Michelle Stirling, Mark DeWolf, and others who dare to disagree with the dominant narrative.”

The report fails to define “denialism” yet claims it “serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials, and unmarked graves.” This suggests that “denialism” means disagreeing with the dominant narrative that Indian Residential Schools were houses of horror marked by racism and genocide.

Decades of Aboriginal-style blood libel assertions hang over all these claims, with an army of activists and their supporters its eager propagandists.

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