RUBENSTEIN: Indigenous graves... it is not racist to ask for proof

Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report, a retired professor of anthropology, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. Increasingly, when it comes to Canadian indigenous grievances and adversities, truth-telling is being redefined as denialism, a term chosen because of its genocide denial allusions. This is my take on Joseph Quesnel’s July 26th Western Standard opinion piece titled, “Those on the right shouldn't call residential school grave issue a ‘hoax.’” It is an essay driven by hurt indigenous feelings ultimately rooted in myths and other fanciful stories transmitted by “knowledge keepers,” rather than by hard evidence and rational contemplation grounded in Western science.The title alone reveals the problem with Quesnel’s analysis.Unless scoring tawdry political points is the goal, simplistically reducing the debate over the Kamloops Indian Band’s claim to have discovered “the remains of 215 children who were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School” to a battle between right-wing and left-wing socio-political positions only obscures the need for verified facts gathered by impartial observers. Determining the facts should be the overriding consideration in deciding whether the Kamloops claim is a hoax, not whether people are on the ‘right’ or the ‘left’ politically, or whether people's feelings are hurt in the process of discovering the truth.Whether he recognizes it or not, Quesnel seems to grudgingly acknowledge the simple-mindedness of his own right-left distinction when he identifies himself as, “We on the Canadian right.”Calling these schools 'concentration camps' is to rob the term of meaning.But, there is no denying that 85 Catholic churches and many other Christian buildings have been set on fire or vandalized since May 2021, according to the Catholic Civil Rights League. The attacks started in response to the increasingly controversial finding of what was initially reported as 215 suspected burial of human remains at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. More than three years later no bodies have been found. Indeed, the Kamloops Indian Band recently referred to “anomalies” rather than remains. This is a clear admission that the May 27th, 2021 claim was a gross slanderous accusation based on no credible evidence, all the more reason to call the initial rush to judgment a hoax.Likewise, unfunded but meticulous historical research by dozens of objective scholars and other writers whose results have been published in two edited volumes and several hundred essays found here, here, here, here, and here conclusively reveals the Kamloops scandal and others like it as the biggest hoax in Canadian history. For daring to set the record straight about Canada's generally altruistic treatment of its indigenous people, the reward of these authors is to be labelled “residential school denialists.”Among the findings of this scholarly research are: · During the entire 113-year period, 1883-1996, these government-funded, church-run schools were in operation, capable parents were not forced to send their children to a boarding school.· On the contrary, most parents eagerly sent their children to a residential school so they could obtain a Western education after voluntarily signing an application form.· Still, only one-third of indigenous children — at most — attended a residential school, often laxly, for an average of 4.5 years. Not enough students attended long enough to have been as negatively affected or fully assimilated, as is traditionally claimed.· It was only orphans, neglected, or abused children who were forced to attend residential schools; as for the rest, federal policies were rarely enforced.· No “missing children” went away to residential schools, never to be heard from again. Instead, their attendance was carefully recorded from registration to completion.· No missing children are buried in unmarked graves underneath or around mission churches and schools.· The suggestion that missing children were murdered by school personnel after being subjected to physical and sexual abuse or even outright torture is a scandalous and undocumented blood libel.· No human remains have been located using ground-penetrating radar except for persons properly registered and buried in known school, church, or community cemeteries.· Attendance at residential schools did not by itself traumatize indigenous people, creating social ills that descended across generations. Instead, many children entered a residential school already damaged by orphanhood, neglect, or abuse on their home reserves.· Children were admitted to schools based on the stated religious affiliation of their parents. Students did not experience “organized religion as something shoved down their throats.”· Residential schools generally either helped preserve or had little effect on pre-existing indigenous languages and culture. There was no mandatory assimilation.· The few known complaints about poor school conditions or treatment that parents and indigenous leaders lodged were either quickly addressed or met by school boycotts. Only today, 28 years after the last school closed, are we being bombarded by widespread complaints that the schools were genocidal institutions, despite not a single substantiated case of the murder of an indigenous child by a staff member at any school;· Those former students who “still find this [residential school] legacy so painful” may well be suffering from false memory syndrome, mass psychosis, or the legacy of their painful pre-residential school background. Still, none of these findings have had much effect on public opinion, testimony to the power of hoaxes called Big Lies, falsehoods so extreme that it would be hard for people to believe someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”· As for the abuse and mistreatment Quesnel fleetingly refers to, of the thousands of boarding school workers living in the schools during its 113-year history, only 15 were found guilty of sexual abuse, including a lone Catholic priest. Compared to intra-Indigenous sexual abuse on and off aboriginal reserves, this figure is very low.· This is not to deny that physical, sexual, and emotional abuse was occurred in these schools, but there is no reason to believe these were more common than in elite boarding schools around the world during the same period. (A negative boarding school life is evident from the recent revelations of Charles Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer and Princess Diana’s younger brother, in his recent memoir where he recounts how horrible his residential school experience was, as was the experience of many other members of the British upper class, a comparison never mentioned when discussing Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, an educational system implicitly described as a uniquely aboriginal phenomenon.As for Quesnel’s call for “sensitivity and discretion,” these are never shown to those who have argued that the Indian Residential Schools, warts and all, were not horror houses, nearly all its students subjected to unspeakable treatment. Only when those commentators stop being defamed as genocide deniers will they begin tempering their use of the term hoax.Until that happens, those on all sides of Canada’s political spectrum who keep damning Canada’s Indian Residential Schools need to realize that if it sounds like a hoax and behaves like a hoax, it’s a hoax [OR a hoax by any other name would smell as sour].Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report, a retired professor of anthropology, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

RUBENSTEIN: Indigenous graves... it is not racist to ask for proof

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