Andrew Woolford (Credits: umanitoba.ca)

In his response to an article written by Jerry Storie (Residential schools: intentions and consequences, Jan. 20), Andrew Woolford criticizes the former NDP MLA and cabinet minister for sullying the legacy of Murray Sinclair with “residential school minimization and misrepresentation” (Column misrepresented Sinclair’s position, Jan. 22).

Storie argued that it was humane judiciousness on Sinclair's behalf that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) did not categorize the Indian Residential Schools (IRS) as a genocide in the criminal sense. The TRC instead concluded that the IRS constituted a ‘cultural genocide’ which has no meaning in law. Rationalizations aside, the qualification relieved Sinclair and the TRC of having to meet the legal tests for proving genocide has been committed, the principal test being to prove intent.

On the face of it, educating a people presupposes their continued existence so where was the genocidal intent in the IRS?

Woolford correctly notes that the TRC did not have “adjudicative power” and that Sinclair “did not refuse to call residential schools a genocide.” In an August 2021 interview, Sinclair explained: “We avoided using the singular word genocide without a defining term (cultural) for a couple of reasons. One was that there was a legal prohibition in our mandate that said that we could not pronounce culpability.” Worried about deletion by the government and courts, the TRC “couched it as carefully as we could, but as clearly as we could, by referencing the term cultural genocide.”

The other reason was also rhetorical in purpose: “What we wanted people to focus on was not the number of children who died. If we had used the term genocide, the simple terminology, then we were causing people to focus upon the question of deliberate killing. And you can find acts of deliberate killing, there’s no question of that (the TRC did not find such acts). But they’re not as numerous as the many, many thousands of children whose lives were negatively affected, and whose existence was brutalized, by the lengths that were taken to eliminate their culture, their language, their sense of identity—and that had a much more significant long-term impact than the act of killing those children who were killed.”

When asked if acceptance of a genocide fosters reconciliation, Sinclair replied, “I think it brings home to people the fact that this was a deliberate effort to annihilate a race.”

For a supposed deliberate effort to annihilate a race, it was oddly partial given that only about a third of eligible children ever attended a residential school throughout the entirety of the IRS system. Another third attended day schools and the other third did not attend any school. Residential schools did have holiday and summer breaks and students were not detained after graduation. Given those windows of privacy and the common dignity of inner dialogue, it’s difficult not to imagine individuals exercising their personal agency to retain as much of their culture as they wished, if they wished to do so.

The fallacy of the argument that residential schools took away students’ culture lies in the assumption that students went to the schools with their traditional cultures intact. For one, that is an impossibility given some 200 preceding years of interaction with European explorers, fur traders, missionaries and settlers. What Woolford and others omit is the fact that, unless a child was admitted for humanitarian reasons such as being an orphan, parents had to enroll their children in the residential schools. Being church-run, the schools were denominational, meaning that parents enrolled their children according to their faith. If families were practicing a Christian faith before their children attended IRS, those families had already begun adapting aspects of a culture outside of their traditions.

Culture isn’t a static inventory and never has been. Humans have always adopted alien cultural aspects they deem to have benefit to themselves and their families. Adjudicating criminal liability for cultural genocide would not only inevitably delve into the messy matter of determining the parents’ own culpability (what about parents who brought radios and television into their homes), it would also question the role of Indigenous staff who worked at the schools and the several bands who took over the schools in their latter days of existence, such as Qu’Appelle where administration was transferred to the band in 1973.

Does anyone want to see Indigenous people being condemned for committing genocide against their own people? The people involved with operating the schools most likely to still be living are the Indigenous people who were involved with residential schools in their later years.

Like Sinclair and many other proponents of the IRS-as-genocide narrative, Woolford argues that assimilation amounts to genocide. Typically this has been how Article 2(e) – “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another” – of the UN Convention on genocide has been interpreted in the context of IRS assimilation. As is sadly typical of Woolford and his cohort, they omit the fact that the transfer has to be intended to be permanent and that there is some racial similarity between the groups in question. Article 2(e) was composed with the abduction of ‘Aryan looking’ Slavic children by the Nazis during WWII in mind.

Woolford states that “Indigenous children were dehumanized by the residential school system.” If we agree that the schools sought to assimilate Indigenous children, then the schools humanized those children because making a people more like you humanizes those people to you. Treating Indigenous people as a race apart from you is dehumanizing to both people.

Woolford accuses Storie of conflating intent with motive but then strangely does so himself by stating that Canadian settler colonialism sought “to denigrate and remove groups perceived as obstacles to land settlement, resource extraction and national consolidation.” If the intent was to destroy Indigenous peoples, why wouldn’t Canada have simply done nothing and left Indigenous people to eventually wither away on reserves without any means to survive in industrial society? There was no welfare state to speak of a century ago which is why the schools so often served as provisional orphanages and children’s shelters.

Woolford alludes to the specter of Bill C-413, a Private Member’s bill introduced by my own MP, Leah Gazan (NDP Winnipeg-Centre) to have the Criminal Code amended to include ‘residential school denialism’. While Woolford has some reservations about criminalizing denialism, he adds that “criminalization is not solely about correcting perpetrators.”

“It is also one way society recognizes certain actions are so harmful that they cross a line in terms of their acceptability. For victims, criminalization of denial thus provides recognition of the suffering residential schools caused to Indigenous Peoples and demonstrates a social concern not to exacerbate this suffering further by enabling disingenuous debaters who try to salvage residential schools from their genocidal history.”

Would Thomson Highway be considered as one of those disingenuous debaters for his memoir, Permanent Astonishment, in which he fondly recalls his years at residential school? After the sensational claim was made that 215 children’s remains were found near the former Kamloops IRS, Sinclair revised his assessment of the IRS as an unqualified genocide but is Tk’emlups Chief Roseanne Casimir guilty of denialism for now stating that only “anomalies” were discovered?

Sinclair suggested that there could be as many as 15-25,000 children missing from the schools and went to his grave without justifying a statement unsupported by the TRC’s own findings. Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray told the Senate Committee on Indigenous People that: “There are no missing children; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because parents were never told where they’re buried.”

Should anyone go to jail for asking the record to be set straight as to whether or not there is even a single child known to have gone missing from any residential school throughout their entire history, much less for demanding any evidence that priests threw living infants born from students they raped into school incinerators?

Both Woolford and Gazan justify criminalization of residential school denialism on the grounds that it will cause further harm to those students who suffered in the schools. Is it not also harmful to allow lurid tales such as priests murdering babies to circulate without scrutiny? What harm is done to former students such as Highway whose experiences contradict the genocide narrative? One former student I know of now says they attended a “private Anglican school” because they don’t want to have to defend their positive experiences against the wish to condemn the schools as singularly negative.

Whatever harm some may feel for being disabused of their tall tales of residential school villainy, is not the greater harm done to those who fear persecution – and possibly prosecution – for stating they knew the schools as a good thing? Must they feel a need to hide or lie about the good life they lived at the schools? Must their own experiences and memories of the schools be metaphorically pitched into a basement incinerator?

The wish to criminalize so-called residential school denialism does not serve anyone’s interests outside of a small number of malefactors seeking to derive personal gain from accusing Canada and the churches of committing what would amount to history’s longest-running genocide. Deny these ghouls their plunder by letting free and open critical discourse to continue.