‘Denying our truth’: Fighting residential school denialism in Canada - chof 360 news

Warning: The story below contains details of residential schools that may be upsetting. Canada’s Indian Residential School Survivors and Family Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day at 1-866-925-4419.

Geraldine Shingoose spent nearly a decade of her childhood far from her family, at a boarding school she could not freely leave.

But it took many years after she got away from the Muscowequan Residential School, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, before she was able to speak about what had happened to her there.

“Our history, the history of residential school, was never taught. It wasn't until the early 1990s when all these stories started coming out,” says Shingoose, 67, who attended Muscowequan from 1962 to 1971.

“I carried my story for a long time without sharing, and it definitely had an impact on my whole wellbeing, emotionally and mentally.”

Shingoose is among the more than 150,000 Indigenous children across Canada who were forced to attend residential schools between the 1870s and 1990s.

They were separated from their families, stripped of their cultures and languages, and subjected to widespread physical, psychological and sexual abuse.

Thousands are believed to have died at the institutions. One government official who oversaw the school system said in 1920 that it was designed to “get rid of the Indian problem”.

Today, nearly 30 years after the last residential school in Canada shut its doors, the intergenerational trauma of the system continues to be felt in First Nation, Metis and Inuit communities.

In 2021, the discoveries of unmarked graves believed to contain children’s remains on the grounds of former institutions pushed the issue to the fore once again, forcing Canadians to confront their country’s harmful legacy of colonialism.

But after this brief moment of reckoning, experts say the pendulum is now swinging in the opposite direction: An alarming trend of residential school denialism is gaining ground – and pouring salt on the wounds of survivors, their families and their communities.

“When people deny our stories, they're denying my truth. They're denying my abuses that I experienced in residential school – the mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and sexual abuse that I experienced,” Shingoose told Al Jazeera.

“They're trying to share a fake, different story about Canada's history, and they're denying our truth.”

That Indigenous children were subjected to human rights abuses at residential schools is not new information.

While it took a long time for survivors like Shingoose to speak about what happened, their experiences – and the widespread harm they suffered – have been a matter of public record for decades.

Funded by the government and run by churches, including, most notably, the Roman Catholic Church, the schools aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into Canada’s predominantly white European culture.

In 2015, a federal commission charged with investigating the system – the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) – laid out mountains of evidence of systemic abuses, neglect and harm. It concluded that the schools amounted to “cultural genocide”.

Thousands of children died at the institutions, the commission said, but “no one took care to count how many died or to record where they were buried”.

Residential school denialists don’t necessarily disagree that the system existed, nor do they refute that abuses occurred, according to Sean Carleton, a history professor at the University of Manitoba.

Instead, Carleton says residential school denialism is often much more insidious.

Residential school denialism can be defined as “the rejection, the twisting or [the] misrepresentation of basic facts about residential schooling”, Carleton told Al Jazeera.

It’s similar to other trends like climate change denialism, where individuals sow doubt in well-established facts.

Some denialist arguments include that residential schools were “well-intentioned”, that abuses have been exaggerated, or that those who ran the institutions were simply trying to educate the children.

Denialists argue that deaths didn’t happen or, if they did, they were unavoidable and the overall policy was not genocidal. Others question why the “positives” of residential schools are not brought up more often.

In recent years, such denialism has been propagated in books and via right-wing media outlets such as The National Post, True North and Rebel News.

Prominent figures in Canada also have engaged in forms of denialism, including former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole, who in 2020 had to walk back a statement he made that residential schools had been designed to “provide education”.

In one of the most glaring examples in recent memory, a Canadian senator drew rebuke in 2017 for saying “there are shining examples from sea to sea of people who owe their lives to the schools” – and then refusing to get “any more education” on the issue.

Carleton said that while most denialist arguments have been thoroughly debunked – both by residential school survivors and the historical record – the truth matters little to bad-faith actors.

“What they're trying to do is shake public confidence in the truth, to close off the avenues to healing and justice and reconciliation,” Carleton said. “Because what they want is to keep the colonial status quo intact.”

In May 2021, that “colonial status quo” was shaken by an announcement in Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia.

Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, a First Nation near the city of Kamloops, announced that a preliminary radar search of the grounds of Kamloops Indian Residential School had uncovered what were believed to be the remains of 215 children.

“To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir said at the time (PDF). “Some were as young as three years old.”

The announcement sent shockwaves across Canada and drew international attention to the country’s treatment of Indigenous people.

Vigils were held in major Canadian cities. Indigenous leaders called for answers from the government and the churches that ran the schools, and communities launched searches of their own. In 2022, Pope Francis came to Canada to apologise for the “evil” that had been committed at the institutions.

Yet, at the same time, the findings in Kamloops also fuelled a wave of denialism as right-wing figures pounced on limited errors in early media reports on the announcement to spread false claims.

They argued that the community had lied about excavating the 215 children’s bodies and that mainstream media outlets were promoting a false narrative to advance reconciliation.

But Tk’emlups te Secwepemc never said it had excavated any bodies. Its radar search was preliminary, and it said more work would be done. Exhumation is also not always a community’s preferred course of action, with some wanting to leave the burials undisturbed.

Still, conspiracy theorists claimed no burials existed at all, and the so-called “mass grave hoax” spread rapidly – including in a book co-written by a former adviser to ex-Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

That conspiracy theory remains one of the most prevalent forms of residential school denialism today. It also has led to real-world consequences.

In a 2023 report (PDF), Kimberly Murray, an independent special interlocutor on missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites associated with residential schools, said denialists had entered the site at Kamloops without permission.

“Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there,” Murray wrote.

Kisha Supernant, director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology at the University of Alberta, said denialists have “preyed on the ambiguity” linked to ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology, which was used in the Kamloops search.

“There was an impression out of Kamloops that ground-penetrating radar can find bodies; it can’t. It can find areas of disturbance. Some of those areas of disturbance are the right size, shape, depth, orientation, to be a potential grave. Others are not,” Supernant explained.

“There’s no such thing as certainty with ground penetrating radar alone because it’s not an X-ray. It’s much more like an ultrasound.”

The technology also works better in specific types of terrain, she told Al Jazeera. For example, searches in sandy soils are more successful compared with ones in gravel or clay.

“There have been times where I’ve been working in-community, and I say, ‘Well, we need to test the equipment first because it may not work in this area',” she said. “And I’m in a cemetery where I know there are graves, and the GPR can’t see them because of the soil conditions.”

Gaps in residential school records also have made investigating deaths at residential schools more difficult – and fuelled denialism.

“There was never really a solid and consistent record-keeping system that managed the schools,” explained Raymond Frogner, the head of archives and senior director of research at the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR).

But Frogner said it is not up for debate that deaths occurred.

Children at residential schools died from illnesses, including influenza or tuberculosis, which often ravaged the overcrowded and poorly ventilated facilities. Some died due to a lack of medical care, from neglect or injuries, or by suicide. Others disappeared after running away.

The latest figure for child deaths at residential schools is approximately 4,100, Frogner told Al Jazeera – but the research is ongoing, and the full tally is expected to be much higher.

The NCTR is also going school-by-school to try to determine “the final destiny” of the children who have gone unaccounted for. Frogner described it as a “difficult and long-term process”.

“In many cases, there is no death certificate, but there are journal entries of a lost child, or the quarterly report indicates that the child is no longer at the school. So the research we're doing now is to track down these kinds of indications of loss,” he said.

Amidst that work, Frogner said the NCTR remains cautious about acknowledging denialism.

“Our mission is to promote an understanding and an education and a healing of these events – not to prove that they actually occurred. That should have already been an accepted fact,” he said.

That was echoed by Supernant, who has been involved in community-led searches associated with residential schools since 2018. “We’re not trying to prove children died; that’s well established,” she said.

“We’re trying to find out where they’re buried because that’s been lost over the years – and sometimes deliberately erased from the landscape.”

While Indigenous communities have long known about deaths at residential schools and the existence of unmarked burial sites, for much of Canada’s history, the residential school system was left unscrutinised.

“Canada normalized the disappearances, deaths and unmarked burials of Indigenous children for well over a century on a scale that is indefensible,” said Murray, the special interlocutor, in her final report (PDF) last year.

Eva Jewell, the head of research at the Indigenous-led Yellowhead Institute, said the feeling of normalisation was prevalent even among residents of her community, the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation in southwestern Ontario.

Chippewas of the Thames was home to one of the country’s first residential schools, Mount Elgin Industrial School.

“It was for a long time just kind of seen as what was necessary to happen to us, in order for us to fit in with this dominant society,” she told Al Jazeera of the residential school system.

But that view began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when former students started speaking out about their experiences with the advent of therapy, Jewell explained.

Then, in the 1990s, groups of survivors filed lawsuits against the Canadian government to demand reparations for what they had endured, culminating in the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement of 2006.

The largest class-action settlement in Canada’s history, the agreement ushered in what Jewell describes as “the apology era”.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) – born out of the settlement agreement – was launched in 2007, and a year later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologised for residential schools in the House of Commons.

In 2015, after hearing from more than 6,500 witnesses – including survivors – over six years, the TRC said in its final report (PDF) that the residential school system “was an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide”.

“Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world,” it said.

Just months after the TRC released its report, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party won federal elections on a promise to make truth and reconciliation with Indigenous people one of its top priorities.

“We have to acknowledge the truth: Residential schools were a reality, a tragedy, that existed here in our country and we have to own up to it,” the prime minister said days after Tk’emlups te Secwepemc located the unmarked graves in Kamloops in 2021.

That June, amid international and domestic outcry, the Trudeau government completed three of the TRC’s “Calls to Action”, including the creation of a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Yet Murray, the special interlocutor, said in her report that there has been “systemic failure to document the historical and ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples within Canada, including the failure to educate Canadians about this aspect of Canada’s national history”.

This “continues to create conditions where denialism can flourish”, she warned.

According to Jewell, the idea underpinning residential school denialism – “that Indigenous peoples are in the first place unworthy of being sovereign peoples” – also remains firmly embedded in the fabric of Canada.

“We actually, historically speaking, have only had a very small window of time where there was an acceptance that residential schools were a harmful practice,” she told Al Jazeera.

“Reconciliation was never strong enough ... in the Canadian public consciousness for us to even be saying that denialism is on the rise. It was more like reconciliation was on the rise, and now it’s fading out,” Jewell said.

“Canadians need to remember that. Reconciliation is not who they are. Denialism is who they are.”

While residential school denialism is specific to Canada, experts say the phenomenon cannot be divorced from wider global trends. That includes the rise of far-right movements and resistance to efforts to confront the effects of colonialism.

Carmen Celestini, a lecturer at the University of Waterloo who studies far-right movements, said residential school denialism has shifted over the past year from conspiracy-theorist circles to being a prominent talking point among white Christian nationalists.

“White nationalists [are] saying that it’s a way to oppress white people and to make white people feel guilt,” Celestini told Al Jazeera.

Denialism, she added, was often an offshoot of a feeling of alienation among predominantly white men.

"When we think about this residential school denialism or the conspiracies that are attached to it ... it really comes from feeling disenfranchised and not part of society or not part of politics.”

Adherents to this way of thinking also buy into the right-wing argument that "woke" actors have launched a concerted attack on "white people history", Celestini explained.

"Their trust groups are individuals like [right-wing figures] Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan, people online who interpret the news or world events through either a conspiracy or a bias or a hate lens,” she said.

In recent years, the United Kingdom and the United States have also seen right-wing pushback against efforts to examine their histories of colonisation and slavery, as well as the existence of systemic racism today.

“They're all engaging in a defence of colonialism as humanitarian, benevolent. They're engaging in racist rhetoric that blames Indigenous people, that undermines their authority,” said Carleton, the University of Manitoba professor.

“Residential school denialism needs to be understood as part of this larger global movement.”

In Canada, as awareness around residential schools has grown, conservatives have rejected efforts to take down statues or rename institutions honouring some of the figures involved in establishing the system.

That includes John A Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, and Egerton Ryerson, an Ontario educator who helped design the residential school policy.

Nevertheless, in 2022, Ryerson University in Toronto was renamed Toronto Metropolitan University due to public pressure.

Carleton said he expects residential school denialism to get worse in this “backlash moment”, particularly as Canada is set to elect a Conservative government later this year.

Recently, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre – a populist who regularly attacks the media and his critics – hailed Macdonald as “a nation-builder” who laid “the foundation for a strong and prosperous country”.

“Without his vision, Canada would not exist today,” Poilievre wrote in a Facebook post on January 11 marking the former prime minister’s birthday.

In " target="_blank"> an interview in early January with Peterson, the right-wing commentator, Poilievre also denounced “an obsession with race that woke-ism has reinserted” and “invented in many ways”.

“We’re going to be grateful again, and we’re going to inculcate the values of gratitude for our incredible history,” Poilievre said, adding that Canada owes “a debt of gratitude to the giants who came before us”.

For Leah Gazan, any rhetoric that fails to recognise “that what happened in residential school was founded on racism, was founded on genocide [and] was founded on the violent dispossession” of Indigenous people is deeply problematic.

The Canadian lawmaker, who represents Winnipeg Centre for the left-leaning New Democratic Party (NDP), also says denialism is an attack on the ability of survivors, their families and their communities to live free from hate.

That’s why, late last year, Gazan put forward legislation that seeks to address the problem by criminalising residential school denialism in Canada.

“People should be free and protected from the incitement of hate. Denying somebody’s genocide, it’s hateful, it’s violent, and we need protection,” Gazan told Al Jazeera.

Bill C-413 would make it a criminal offence for anyone to willfully promote “hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it”.

The proposed legislation is modelled on a provision recently added to Canada’s Criminal Code that makes it a crime to condone, downplay or deny the Holocaust, other than in private conversation. The provision provides a short list of exemptions.

Some right-wing media outlets have hit out against Gazan’s proposal, arguing that it would infringe upon freedom of expression.

But Kenneth Grad, a professor of law at the University of Manitoba, said “it’s very unlikely” that the bill would be declared unconstitutional.

While freedom of expression is guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Grad explained that the Supreme Court of Canada “has upheld hate speech laws, specifically willful promotion of hatred, as being a justifiable limit”.

“There is an important symbolism to these provisions,” he told Al Jazeera.

However, Grad noted that the provision making Holocaust denial a criminal offence has rarely been used since it was enacted in 2022, which raises the question of just how effective these types of measures are in practice.

He added that, given the “pernicious” nature of residential school denialism, “the desire to combat it through the criminal law is natural”.

“But I do think that, as far as their practical utility, there’s reason to question how much they will actually accomplish in terms of combatting residential school denialism.”

Still, many say that criminalising residential school denialism is a critical step if Canada is serious about protecting those most affected.

Doug George-Kanentiio is among the residential school survivors who have expressed support for Bill C-413.

A survivor of the Mohawk Institute residential school in Brantford, Ontario, he said the legislation will help give a “meaningful voice” to the children who never came home – including those whose remains are believed to be buried on the grounds of that institution.

“We’re trying hard to bring justice to those children,” George-Kanentiio said during an October news conference in support of the bill.

“When people say that [things] didn’t happen, I challenge them: Come to the Mohawk Institute. It’s still standing,” he said.

“Walk with us through the grounds, and listen to the children as they run up and down those stairs trying to escape their abusers. That’s the reality of the Mohawk Institute. You can’t hide behind these things. You have to come to grips with it.”

It remains unclear if and when Bill C-413 will be introduced for debate in Parliament.

The House of Commons is set to resume in late March, but opposition MPs are expected to quickly move to bring down the Liberal Party government and trigger an election. Polls suggest the vote will likely usher in a new Conservative administration.

“If this country is not ready to protect the truth, if this country is not ready to protect survivors, their descendants, communities and families, we’re not ready to reconcile in this country,” said Gazan, who told Al Jazeera she will keep speaking out.

Whichever party is in power, Indigenous advocates say Ottawa should take concrete action to push back against residential school denialism, including by investing in education.

“There is this education gap that denialists are preying on and there's not a lot of movement in terms of bringing people into the conversation to learn the truth,” said Carleton, the professor. “That's sort of where we're stuck.”

The government also needs to provide long-term funding for Indigenous communities seeking to investigate deaths and unmarked burial sites linked to residential schools, according to Supernant.

She said that since the Kamloops announcement in 2021, there has been a 10-fold increase in community interest in conducting searches, but many of the funding agreements are ending this year or in 2026.

“I worry ... that without that support and without that resourcing, communities aren’t going to get what they need, and it’s just going to continue to do harm. And that’s a very real possibility right now,” Supernant said.

And for survivors like Geraldine Shingoose, there is no time to waste in confronting denialism.

“As a survivor, I'm out there sharing my story. I've shared my story probably with over 25,000 individuals in schools, universities and organisations,” she told Al Jazeera.

“But you know, we're not going to be here [much] longer to share our stories. We need people to listen to us.”