McCRAE: When will the CBC tell us the whole truth?

James C. McCrae is a former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge.Last month, the CBC reported that the Opaskwayak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba claimed to have found evidence of unmarked burials at a former residential school site.CBC’s Arturo Chang reported that cadaver dogs had found six areas of interest near the former MacKay Indian Residential School (IRS) near Opaskwayak Cree Nation (OCN.) According to OCN Chief Maureen Brown: “the chief said research on the children that went missing during that period of time (1914-33) will take place.”There is no evidence that any child “went missing” from the MacKay Indian Residential School, however. Moreover, the work to learn more about the school began three years ago, shortly after the outrageous announcement in 2021 that "the remains of 215 children" had been found at Kamloops, B.C. We can only wonder what work was done, because it took three years to bring in the cadaver dogs.Mr. Chang reported: “The plan is to confirm the findings with ground-penetrating radar, which is expected to happen in the spring.”Why wait for spring? In any event, ground-penetrating radar can only detect underground anomalies; it can’t “confirm” anything. Experts tell us the only way to confirm is to excavate. If Mr. Chang knew that in 1915, a hospital was built 300 feet from the school to provide health care to students who needed it as well as to residents of a number of nearby Indigenous communities, surely that fact would have been quite relevant to his story.The hospital near the school was well equipped and staffed by competent personnel. Its electric lighting and running water were virtually non-existent in rural schools at the time. Sadly, people die in hospitals. In some parts of Canada, people are buried near the hospitals where they died, people who might have been students, or might have been anyone else.“Hopefully, out of the communities that will be visited, the stories will come out, and we'll be able to find closure for those families who have lost loved ones," Brown said. Chief Brown ought to know by now which families lost loved ones. Who are those families? Who are the “lost” children?The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) lists nine children who, the centre says, “died at or went missing from” the MacKay school at The Pas. Researchers have found Manitoba death registrations for seven of them. We know the names of the two remaining children listed, and when they died, so perhaps more can be learned about them.(To digress, why does the NCTR claim Sinclair Anderson and Stella Constant died at the MacKay school in 1905, long before the school existed? Their death registrations indicate they died in 1931 and 1930, respectively. This is but one of many examples of why we can’t trust the accuracy — or perhaps even the honesty — of NCTR’s record-keeping.)It is curious that Mr. Chang did not include in his story the usual CBC paragraph included in nearly every CBC Indigenous story that ”150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend” the schools. Perhaps he was aware that The Pas band provided, free of charge, 320 acres of its reserve for the MacKay school. Perhaps he knew that The Pas band members and others petitioned for and demanded the construction of the school several times: in 1903, when nearly all the “Indians” of the region were adherents of the Church of England; in another petition, Sept. 25, 1907, by the chiefs and councillors of The Pas, Cedar Lake, Cumberland, Shoal Lake and Red Earth bands; again on August 21,1909,The Pas chief and councillors asked the Inspector of Indian Agencies for a residential School.If Mr. Chang knew these things, why did he fail to include them in his story?It would have been instructive to be told that the school’s first principal was an Indigenous man, Rev. Louis Laronde. Laronde, a graduate from the Indian residential school at Battleford, Sk. and a B.A. graduate from the “Manitoba University”, served as principal at MacKay for several years.Did Mr. Chang not know that in 1903, there were already eight day schools operating in The Pas Agency, but only 50 per cent of eligible children were attending them, and that this was one of the reasons for the demand for a residential school?Did Mr. Chang not know that parents in the region were unhappy about sending their children to the far-away Elkhorn school, and wanted them to be enrolled in a residential school closer to them? If Mr. Chang did know all these things, a balanced story should have been his assignment. If he did not, he should have done at least some homework, rather than serving simply as a stenographer for the band at The Pas.Since the Kamloops announcement of the “discovery” of the remains of 215 Indigenous children secretly buried by six-year-old children, there have been many announcements of searches for former IRS students across the country. Several actual excavations have taken place; no remains have been found. And in his report about the MacKay school, Mr. Chang makes no mention of any involvement by the RCMP. We need to wonder why. Perhaps Chief Brown can be asked to explain.Canadians are paying with their taxes to be told the truth — the whole truth — by their national broadcaster. After all these years of their apartheid history, Indigenous Canadians, especially, deserve better. (Information in this article has been gleaned from Library and Archives Canada records. James C. McCrae is a former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge

McCRAE: When will the CBC tell us the whole truth?

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