Some People Are "Special"

Indeed!:

But more noticeably, Murray’s trilogy reads too much like a jargon-jumbled critical theory dissertation and syllabus on “settler colonialism,” the dead-end ideology that imagines Canada, Israel, the United States and Australia as irredeemably illegitimate settler states locked in perpetual systems of capitalism, patriarchy, genocide, misogyny, racism, oppression, and heteronormativity.

At least Murray is straightforward about it. The term “settler colonialism” appears 89 times in her final submissions. She name checks the critical-theory big shots, like Judith Butler, who’s probably best known outside the faculty lounges for her 2006 declaration that Hamas and Hezbollah are “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”

As with Butler’s view of Palestinians, Murray writes that Indigenous deaths are “ungrievable” in Canada. Lesser-known pseuds like settler-colonialism wizard Patrick Wolfe, author of such riveting page-turners as Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, also get a look-in.

This might go some distance to explain why one of Murray’s key recommendations would require Canada to submit itself for prosecution before the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, on the grounds that many of the children enrolled at residential schools down through years are not just missing but are rather the victims of “enforced disappearance.”

It’s not clear just how many Indigenous children from the residential schools era died after their enrolment and it’s not clear how many are missing, or rather were “disappeared,” or where they are buried. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s researchers put the number at roughly 3,200. Others have suggested the figure is much higher. But are they disappeared, or even missing? In March, 2023, Murray told the Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous People: “The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried.”

This is the gnawing wound at the heart of Canada’s residential schools debates, which Murray is very keen to police and patrol. It’s not just the Canadian state that owes reparations. “Media organizations must make reparations for their role in supporting settler colonialism and by denying and limiting truths about the Indian Residential School System,” Murray concludes.

Newsrooms should investigate their past complicity in mass human rights violations against Indigenous people, perform audits and studies of their coverage of Indigenous affairs, issue apologies, develop “ethical standards for trauma-informed reporting” and undertake any other such reparations measures as identified in consultation with Indigenous people, Murray says.

To further guard against the boogeyman of “residential schools denialism,” an abstraction that presumes to describe any downplaying of the genocidal nature of the schools, Murray adds her voice to the New Democratic Party’s proposal to situate skepticism of certain commonplace claims about the schools in the same section of the Criminal Code that outlaws Holocaust denial. The proposal is also supported by Justice Minister Virani. It’s not clear whether his cabinet colleagues are completely onside.

The Online Harms Act, Bill C-63, should also be amended to “address the harms associated with denialism” about the schools, and about missing and disappeared children and unmarked burials, Murray says. These strictures would be difficult to enforce, to say the least, and not just because of the freedom of speech provisions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

During a spasm of national hysteria, riots and church burnings and desecrations that erupted in May, 2021 after the reported discovery of a “mass grave” in an apple orchard at the long-shuttered Kamloops residential school, the crime of “denialism” was widely alleged against any public notice that in fact no such thing had been discovered.

The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc had said nothing about a “mass grave” to begin with, having referred instead to 215 burials, and the Tk’emlups leaders themselves have since “downplayed” the ground-penetrating radar results to encounters with “anomalies” below the soil surface.

But it was the Kamloops imbroglio and a series of similarly misreported “discoveries” in the following months that led to Murray’s appointment. That’s when the trajectory of federal residential-schools policy remedies took an especially sinister turn.

**

The federal probe on Indigenous missing children and unmarked graves, the final report of which was released last Tuesday, does touch on the topic of residential schools. Mostly, though, it’s a 1,300-page tome that sets out arguments against the Canadian state.

And because it’s so long and full of filler, few people will ever read the thing to appreciate its absurdity. Even the executive summary, at an undigestible length of nearly 300 pages, defeats its own purpose. Canadians, this $10.4-million essay project isn’t for you. It’s for governments and lawyers to use as support for future billion-dollar payouts and future arguments in court for more colonial concessions.

 

 A rather long, verbose and expensive way to delete Canada from existence

But, you know, rea$on$.