TRC Chair Murray Sinclair: Genocide Denier.
TRC Chair Murray Sinclair: Genocide Denier.
Proposition: The Trudeau Liberals' governing principle: You may know what we allow you to know; You'll believe what we tell you to believe; Disbelieve and you may be prosecuted.
The Real Story wasn’t supposed to be a daily, but it’s been pretty close this past week. This is an in-depth Sunday evening Real Story Special. Not for the fainting type. Mostly above the paywall though. Just be advised.
Here’s the venerated, never-to-be-questioned Murray Sinclair, he of the Meritorious Service Cross, Order of Canada, Chancellor of Queens University, former judge, former senator, and former chair of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission:
“While the TRC has heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care.” Sinclair wrote those words in a letter to the Calgary Herald a few years ago, while he was presiding in his TRC top job. He added: “These experiences must also be heard.”
These experiences must also be heard.
Well, that’s odd, because Attorney-General David Lametti and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller have now declared that they would be happy to consider a statute that would apparently outlaw the modest standpoint Sinclair articulated back then. What Lametti and Miller have both suggested is that to utter such a sentiment is the equivalent of committing the cruel obscenity of Holocaust denial.
After all, Sinclair asserted that among the priests and nuns and lay teachers at the residential schools there were “committed educators” who were animated by “dedication and compassion,” who sought to “nurture the children in their care.” Further: “These experiences must also be heard.”
And only last week, the former TRC commissioner’s own son, Niigaan Sinclair, joined with his fellow University of Manitoba assistant professor Sean Carleton to describe such assertions as “attempts to twist, downplay or minimize established facts and survivor accounts,” and to claim that such statements amount to “residential schools denialism.”
That’s because the “residential schools denialism” heresy of the kind Murray Sinclair committed can be construed to twist or downplay or minimize “established facts and survivor accounts,” and is thus a wicked thing that will have the effect of “discouraging survivors from sharing their truth, undermining public confidence in reconciliation and protecting the colonial status quo and guilty parties.”
Ordinarily, mumbo jumbo of that sort might be ignored - Carleton is the jackass who first came to public attention for setting off the Great Vancouver Canucks’ Jersey Logo Cultural Appropriation Scandal that turned out to be no such thing. But Carleton is also the inventor or co-inventor of the “residential schools denialism” canard.
Carleton is held to be the leading authority on this thing that the Trudeau government adopted as a rhetorical bludgeon right around the time the National Post published Year of The Graves: How the world’s media got it wrong on residential school graves last year.
The Year of the Graves effort was my 5,500-word unraveling of what really happened during the months-long “George Floyd moment” the Trudeau government openly counseled and put in motion in 2021, following claims about an alleged “discovery” at the old Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Background on the early-innings backlash for a later look-in if you like: When White People Lose Their Minds.
You may know what we allow you to know
Apart from outlawing any serious, fact-based “discourse” concerning Canada’s residential schools legacy unencumbered by a state-enforced taboo deriving from the crackpottery of “denialism,” Lametti is also considering something even less becoming of a liberal democracy. He’s entertaining amendments to federal laws that would put primary historical sources related to all Indigenous issues off limits to open inquiry.
Under another abstract invention, this one known as “data sovereignty,” authority over all Indigenous-related records held by government departments, universities or church organizations would be handed to some sort of Indigenous or quasi-Indigenous access-vetting body. I’ll have more on that below.
The proposal to criminalize the denialism heresy was first put forward by NDP MP Leah Gazan and favorably entertained by Miller (NDP MP calls for hate speech law to combat ‘residential school 'denialism'). It followed on Gazan’s successful motion in the House of Commons last fall construing the heresy as hate speech - a success Gazan herself happily described as having “moved the pendulum in quite an extreme way.”
That pendulum is moving even further to the extreme now that Lametti is looking at the proposal just as favorably following the interim report released a few days ago by Kimberly Murray, Lametti’s very own Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.
Murray says Ottawa needs to give such legal mechanisms “urgent consideration.” Murray said quite a lot of astonishing things that have been reported uncritically and not subjected to the “violence” of scrutiny. I’ll come to all that below, too.
You will believe what we tell you to believe
Taking Carleton’s jumbled sort-of definition of his fatuous abstraction on its face, Murray Sinclair himself is guilty as sin.
Surely not Murray Sinclair! After all, he’s of the same high status and rank as David Johnston, our esteemed former governor-general, he of the PC CC CMM COM CD FRSC (hon) and FRCPSC (hon), more recently Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s “special independent rapporteur” on Beijing’s election interference operations. We all believe things Sinclair and Johnston say, don’t we?
Surely Johnston is someone we must believe, as we must believe that his whitewash of a report into the conduct of Beijing’s friends in high Laurentian places is a work of unimpeachable integrity. Johnston’s imprimatur surely obviates the necessity and the bother of a proper public inquiry that might allow us to know a thing or two about what the hell has been going on up there, doesn’t it?
I’ve already written about how this crippling shift in epistemology - the substitution of knowledge with belief - has mangled Canadians’ understanding of their own history, and infantilized journalism as well, so I won’t bang on about it here. As it applies to the residential schools cacophony, come back if you like to this when you’re done here: When narrative replaces facts.
But back to this particular black magic that has captured the Trudeau government, and how it’s defined. More an eight-point manifesto than a definition, really, Carleton co-wrote the thing with the “Colorado-born citizen of the Cherokee Nation” and University of British Columbia professor of Critical Indigenous Studies and English Language and Literatures, Daniel Heath Justice.
You can read it here.
Click the manifesto’s links to examples of these sinister denialists and among them you’ll find Tomson Highway, the internationlly acclaimed Cree playwright, novelist, classical pianist and Order of Canada recipient. Carleton’s so-called denialists also include “relatives of residential school staff who uncritically refer to personal memory and work to defend their family reputations”.
It just so happens that it was precisely such an invocation of personal memory and defence of family reputation that Murray Sinclair was praising in his letter to the Herald.
That invocation was in the form of an essay about Elsie McLaren Meadows, a graduate of Manitoba’s Brandon Residential School, who remembered her time there as “some of the happiest days of her life.” Elsie went on to university and ended up teaching in remote Indigenous communities with her husband, a United Church Minister. They were both fluent in Saulteaux, Cree and Ojibwe, and literate in Cree syllabics.
The Herald essay was written by Elsie’s daughter Lea Meadows, who reflected upon “the deep hurt my family feels at their work being routinely described as ‘abusive,’ or ‘cultural genocide.” The essay clearly disobeys five of the eight exhortations in Carleton’s catechism, perhaps most clearly his admonition against “individualized, positive recollections from the schools”. And yet Murray Sinclair was heartened by and agreed with all of Lea’s arguments.
So is Murray Sinclair, officially venerated and now all but canonized, a residential schools denialist?
The “violence” of asking: Is this actually true?
I got into a bit of the more astonishing and unsubstantiated claims in Kimberly Murray’s report in my column in the National Post this past week, which was unusually mostly an opinion piece rather than an analysis or an explainer. My opinion on the denialism canard is adequately captured in the subhead: Its purpose is to end questioning and to patrol what knowledge we're entitled to possess.
That such questioning is “violence” was just one weird thing Murray had to say for herself. Here’s something that stands out in her report: “Every time an announcement of anomalies, reflections or recoveries relating to the existence of unmarked burials is made, Indigenous communities are being attacked by denialists challenging these findings. This violence is prolific and takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations.”
I wouldn’t know about any of that. I also wouldn’t know about the report’s claim involving unidentified persons who showed up one night (we are not even allowed to ask when) at the site of the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential school, with shovels. The RCMP is unaware of this event. These unidentified persons allegedly told other people whose identities Murray’s report does not disclose that they intended to start digging for evidence to substantiate the reported “mass grave” that caused Justin Trudeau to go Full Metal Nutcase on the weekend of May 29-30, 2021.
Maybe the Night of the Shovel Carriers actually occurred. I have no idea. But I do know that whenever “an announcement of anomalies” at an old residential school site is made, as Murray puts it, the “findings” are routinely accompanied by lurid hearsay accounts from unidentified witnesses of children being awoken in the middle of the night to bury their classmates, babies thrown into incinerators, corpses of children thrown into lakes and rivers, children tortured in dungeons, priests “decapitating” children or dead boys hanging by their necks in a barn.
And I also know that it has been only on the rarest of occasions that reporters will commit such acts of denialist “violence” as to even ask to speak with a witness to one of these alleged atrocities.
What we know, what’s new, and what we knew all along
And that’s what’s “new” here. There was no “long-overdue reckoning” of Canada’s residential-schools legacy in 2021. National residential-school reckonings have been occurring roughly every decade in this country, going back a century.
Another thing that was new and utterly bizarre that occurred in 2021 was a state-incited mayhem of anti-Catholic hate crimes that we’re barely allowed to acknowedge, and we dare not describe that way. Nowhere in the mass media will you find what Statistics Canada found, which was an historic 260-percent spike in hate crimes targeting Catholics and their insitutions that were reported to police that year.
[Correction: “Nowhere” is not correct. At the Vancouver Sun, my old friend and colleague Doug Todd noticed the spike: “But, for puzzling reasons, neither politicians nor most media mentioned that, while hate crimes against Blacks went down by five per cent and up 16 per cent against Chinese and other East Asians, attacks on Catholics rose by far the most — by an astonishing 260 per cent.” Doug is routinely on top of stories the rest of the news media either misses or deliberately avoids.]
So what’s the point of “residential schools denialism,” really?
According to the Carleton, I committed a “textbook case” of residential-schools denialism in my Year of The Graves reconstruction, and it wasn’t even about residential schools. I’ve written about and with Indigenous peoples extensively over the years, and I harbour no heterodox views about residential schools. Immediately after the Truth and Reconciliation report was released in 2015 (and well before, and ever since), I have concurred with the “cultural genocide” proposition Murray Sinclair articulated upon the report’s release.
And yet for merely undertaking the Year of the Graves reconstruction of the news media’s almost innumerable yellow-journalism excesses in “covering” that series of “discoveries” after the initial Martians-Have-Landed shocker out of Kamloops, I’m to be understood as the equivalent of a Holocaust denier.
So says Carleton, Marc Miller, the chairman of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Archeological Association, the Society for American Archeology the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology (CABA-ACAB), and the Canadian Permafrost Association (CPA). All because of Year of the Graves, which wasn’t even about residential schools.
And that’s why I’ve been dragged back to the unprecedented national psychotic episode of statue-toppling and church-burning that was incited and sustained by the Trudeau government only two years ago. Here’s what you should understand. This is the point of “residential schools denialism.” It’s the factual record of that historic year that Lametti and Miller and the rest now want you to forget, and to never discuss out loud, on pain of prosecution.
In that factual record, the Trudeau Liberals wanted Canada to have its own George Floyd moment, and they said so, and that’s what they got. The mania was cunningly fomented by the Trudeau government. The flags were lowered on Parliament Hill and they stayed at half-mast on all federal buildings for months. Before the T’Kemlups ground-penetrating-radar specialist had a chance to walk back the first reports and attempt to correct the initial “mass grave” headlines that circled the world, the flags were already at half staff.
The fix was already in. “This week has opened the eyes of many Canadians,” declared Carolyn Bennett, who was Indigenous Relations minister at the time. “Like George Floyd did.”
Owing largely to ignorance and unfamiliarity with the residential-schools legacy and cowardice in the decimated ranks of competent journalists in this country, what really happened two years ago has already pretty much vanished down the memory hole.
Well, I’m sorry, but it happened. Facts matter. Even the littlest facts matter, and here’s a little fact that matters a lot.
In Independent Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray’s just-pubished report, there was this throwaway bit, which I noted in my column on Thursday. An unidentified T’kemlups community member is reported to have said there was no intention “when we started. . . that this was going to happen,” referring to the deafening uproar the Kamloops “mass grave” story would set off.
“We did not intend that it become an international conversation. Survivors wanted to come and pay respects, because they were the ones that buried the children.”
And there it is, right there, the business about children being made to bury their dead classmates in secret, at night, in an apple orchard. The very thing that ignited the “international conversation” in the first place.
Just where does this story about the apple orchard burials that have not been and were never discovered at Kamloops come from, exactly? Why is the Trudeau government going to such extraordinary extremes to stop anyone from knowing, or even asking?
This is where things get serious. Five newsletters in a row without a paywall. I can’t keep doing this. Give me a hand here. . .