Some People Are "Special"

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You could say that Panic of 2021 was itself a “dark chapter in Canadian history,” and its lasting damage to Canadians’ sense of their own history is not entirely incalculable. Last October, an Angus Reid poll showed that nearly one in five Canadians believe the horribly high mortality rates in the schools were not due to the known causes of infectious diseases like tuberculosis and influenza, but rather the result of children being deliberately killed.

Within the T’Kemlups community, however, almost from the beginning there were serious misgivings about the way their story was being told. The 14 major families within the community made it known to Casimir early on that an excavation of the orchard site should begin as soon as possible. Three years and nearly $8 million in federal funding later, no excavation has occurred.

Chief Casimir says the work being done is “in compliance with Secwépemc laws, legal traditions, worldviews, values and protocols.” However: “Our investigative findings and investigative steps are currently being kept confidential to preserve the integrity of the investigation.”

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Just where the stories about secret nighttime burials in the orchard came from is also shrouded in contradiction and conspiracy theory. The stories first came to public attention around 2006, when the defrocked United Church Minister Kevin Annett was in Kamloops with tall tales about Queen Elizabeth taking children from the Kamloops Indian Residential School on a picnic, and the children were never seen again.

Annett was the convenor of an imaginary “International Tribunal into Crimes of Church and State” who claimed that Queen Elizabeth was named in an arrest warrant issued by the similarly imaginary “International Common Law Court of Justice in Brussels.” One of Annett’s Indigenous collaborators at the time was a certain William Combes, who claims to have witnessed the burial of a child in a hole dug in the orchard when he was enrolled at the Kamloops institution.

But T’Kemlups elder Emma Baker, who attended the residential school in the 1950s, told CTV News three years ago that she and her friends used to concoct scary stories about graves on the schoolgrounds. “There was a big orchard there and we used to make up stories of the graveyard being in the orchard,” Baker told CTV News Channel on Saturday. “There was rumours of a graveyard, but nobody seemed to know where it was and we didn’t even know if it was true.”

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The credibility of the 2021 ground-penetrating radar study was also thrown into doubt in 2022 when Casimir and her council were presented with an independent site analysis showing that the anomalies were less likely graves and more likely the result of decades of ground disturbances — irrigation ditches, utility lines, backhoe trenches, archeological digs, water lines, drainage tiles and so on.

But to even point out facts that run counter to Ottawa’s “narrative” is to commit an act of “residential school denialism,” and the federal government isn’t going to tolerate anything like that. The recent federal budget set aside $5 million over the next three years to allow Crown Indigenous Relations — Northern Affairs Canada to “establish a program to combat denialism, a species of thoughtcrime that a succession of federal cabinet ministers has stated a willingness to consider criminalizing.

Last June, combating “residential school denialism” was a major focus of the 175-page interim report by Kimberly Murray, Ottawa’s Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools. Murray’s office is supposed to expire this year, but the push to criminalize dissent from residential-school orthodoxy should be expected to persist.

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A key element of Murray’s report was its assertion that to dispute the proposition that Canada’s residential schools constituted genocide, or to make a case for the schools’ sometimes benign features, is to engage in denialism, which is to engage in “violence” and a form of “hate speech” that should be outlawed.

Last year, a Senate Indigenous People’s Committee report said “denialism” would include criticisms of the credibility of the Tk’emlúps documentation of the orchard graves hypothesis. “Denialism serves to distract people from the horrific consequences of Residential Schools and the realities of missing children, burials and unmarked graves,” concluded the report.

Earlier this week, the Assembly of First Nations’ B.C. Regional Chief Terry Teegee suggested that the absence of any physical evidence of human remains in suspected grave sites could be explained by the “incinerators” that were present at most residential schools.

In any case, since the Kamloops story broke, the federal government has committed $320 million to assist in the search of residential school sites across Canada and to support “survivors.” The Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund is for communities and families to research, locate and document burial sites, as well as to memorialize the deaths of children and return remains home.

The project is funded to the end of next year.

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When it comes to disease, the Schools also emerge with high marks. Between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries the biggest killer by far across the population in Canada was tuberculosis. Many residential-school students died of it. This is not surprising, since for many years almost every student admitted to a residential school was carrying the TB bacillus. Overwhelmingly it was children from the reserves who brought tuberculosis into the schools, not the schools that transmitted the disease to healthy students.

Thanks to the introduction of new drugs TB mortality fell dramatically from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Among First Nations people as a whole it dropped from 627 to 100 per 100,000 population. During the same period mortality in the schools plunged from 230 to barely 20 deaths per 100,000 — just one-fifth of overall First Nations mortality from TB. In other words, you had a much better chance of avoiding death from TB if you attended a Residential School than if you didn’t. 

The Schools can boast an impressive record with other diseases as well. During the terrible Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918-19, the death rate in the Schools was well under 27% of the rate for all First Nations people.

Residential Schools also pioneered in the treatment of Trachoma, a disease that often resulted in blindness. During the 1930s the incidence of Trachoma among students declined sharply. Sulfanilamide treatment, which began at the end of the 1930s then practically eliminated the disease.

It has also been shown that those who attended a Residential School were less likely to suffer from either drug abuse or binge drinking. Chief Dan George of the ​​Tsleil-Waututh Nation (Burrard Indian Band) declared that the closing of reserve schools and sending Indians to white schools was “just another promise that the white man has broken.” The sad consequence, he said, was that “Indians now learn to use drugs and liquor at an earlier age, habits they never developed at Indian residential schools.”

A bonus in historical ineptitude:

Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard (N.S.), a Liberal appointee, yesterday said cabinet must apologize for what she called Canada’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade. No Canadian Parliament ever legalized slavery. Most Black people arrived here after 1971, according to Statistics Canada: “It would be really good for Black Canadians to know why there is such resistance to issuing an apology.”