ROTHENBURGER – Book banning on the bumpy road toward reconciliation

IT’S BEEN THREE YEARS and a bit since the announcement that 215 suspected graves (later re-calculated to 200) had been found on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

The anniversary was a few weeks ago, May 27. Since then we’ve had National Indigenous Day and the release of a ‘Sacred Covenant’ between Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc and the Catholic church.

During the three years, ‘the missing’ or Le Estcwicwéy̓ as they’re called, have been the catalyst for discussion around reconciliation. Yet, in some ways, that discussion has become harder instead of easier.

This fact is illustrated by what’s been happening in Quesnel with an unfortunate confrontation over a book that challenges much of the current narrative around residential schools. The mayor, Ron Paull, filed a petition in B.C. Supreme Court recently asking for an order to override a censure motion against him passed by councillors.

He’s been removed from the Cariboo Regional District board and most civic committees, and his travel and lobbying budgets have been terminated. Last week, the City of Quesnel gave notice it’s seeking to have the lawsuit dismissed.

The mayor is also banned from entering First Nations land.

The controversy began in March when one of the councillors complained that Paull’s wife, Pat Morton, had passed around some copies of Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools).

Paull denied having ever read the book himself, and said he had no interest in doing so, even though he acknowledged taking a copy of it to a meeting of the regional district board. He didn’t make any reference to it during the meeting but says he did show it to two colleagues and mused about what the CRD library system was likely to do with it.

There followed an emotional encounter at a council meeting attended by outraged members of the Lhako Dene Nation who declared they no longer wished to work with Paull on reconciliation. Morton attempted to explain her role in the situation but was shut down.

Lhako Dene leaders emotionally said they shouldn’t have to defend their condemnation of what they believe to be one of the darkest chapters in Canadian history. One said the book not only denies the horrors of residential schools, but their very existence. The media, for their part, routinely refer to the book as the work of denialists. The Quesnel council passed a motion denouncing it as “harmful.”

I hadn’t read the book when the controversy first exploded but I’ve read it now. Certainly, it’s contentious but, rather than denying the existence of residential schools, it’s all about them, and frequently acknowledges that terrible things happened there.

From the comments of its detractors, and of the media, I wonder how many people have actually read it. Undoubtedly, they would find much in it to disagree with but Grave Error isn’t a denialist polemic based on somebody’s ill-researched personal opinion. It isn’t easy reading, either, because it takes an academic approach to the residential school issue based on records, statistics and study.

A collection of essays from various academics and researchers, it challenges many of the claims about residential schools, often citing the situation at the Kamloops residential school and its ‘missing.’

For example, it counters the common claim that almost all indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools against their will and that of their parents, stating that a third didn’t attend any school, another third attended residential schools and the rest attended day school. They weren’t “torn from their mother’s arms,” as commonly claimed, says the book.

It says parental consent had to be obtained, and attendance wasn’t mandatory for the first 37 years, after which schooling was made compulsory similar to the rest of the school system. But, say the authors, compulsory attendance only applied to day schools and was never enforced. For a child to attend a residential school, an application form signed by the parents or guardian was required.

The book notes that no excavations have so far confirmed the existence of bodies of missing children in connection with residential schools, and contends that excavations — or, at least, core sampling — of suspected unmarked graves must be done to provide proof. It further argues that allegations of criminal activity at the schools should be thoroughly investigated by RCMP, though it insists there are no authenticated cases of homicides at the Kamloops school in its 88-year history. “Not one.”

Grave Error challenges, in particular, the narrative around the KIRS, contradicting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s assertion that 51 children are known to have perished there or within a year of leaving. Using records in Library and Archives Canada, and death certificates, the book’s researchers found that 17 of those named on the TRC list died in hospital and eight on their respective reserves from accident or illness.

Twenty-four were interred in their respective reserve cemeteries and four others in the Kamloops reserve cemetery. Information on others still hasn’t been unearthed. “Still,” says the book, “these findings contrast significantly with unfounded claims that authorities ignored or concealed children’s deaths, that parents were uninformed, and that remains were never returned home. In reality, most parents were informed, and most children’s remains were returned home.”

At another point, the book comments, “Indian parents, like other parents, loved their children and certainly would have noticed if they went away to school and never came back.”

Such assertions are certainly bound to upset those who believe suspicions about missing children. They won’t like the book’s statement that many residential school staff were loving, its challenge to stories of furnaces and hangings, and especially its examination of the claims of genocide and cultural genocide.

It’s understandable why the book is controversial but, rather than being denialist literature, it asks for evidence. Its conclusions should certainly be challenged — along with some of the authors’ more inflammatory assumptions — because that’s the way to get at the truth in truth and reconciliation, not through book banning.

The struggle is, perhaps, illustrated by the changing terminology and difficulty in defining the GPR findings at the Kamloops residential school. When the test results were first announced, Kúkpi7 Rosanne Casimir described them as “confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

At the Assembly of First Nations general meeting on July 6, 2021, she referred in a resolution to a “mass grave” having been discovered at the Kamloops school. Later that month, Dr. Sarah Beaulieu, who conducted the GPR survey, described “probable burials” and “targets of interest.”

On May 18 of this year, Kúkpi7 Casimir called the findings “215 anomalies” but, on May 27, returned to “probable unmarked burial sites.”

The “Sacred Covenant” between the Band and the Catholic Church (specifically, the Archdiocese of Vancouver and the Diocese of Kamloops), signed in March but not released until June 21, states, “In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation reported that preliminary findings from a ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey of the grounds at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School revealed ‘approximately 200’ anomalies, some of which might be unmarked graves of former students. The Nation cautioned that more research was needed to determine what exists in that part of the former Residential School site.”

The book Grave Error contends that the answer to the question of what the GPR survey found remains open and that research provides empirical evidence that challenges prevailing assumptions upon which so much of the public narrative around residential school grievances and claims is based. It puts science up against oral histories. It adds knowledge to the discussion, though much of it is inconsistent with what we’ve come to think about residential schools.

 The controversy around the book — which at least two B.C. libraries (the Thompson-Nicola Regional Library isn’t one of them) refuse to put on their shelves — raises some questions, aside from whether a mayor should be punished for his wife’s choice of literature.

Does the quest for truth have room for dissenting opinions about how that truth is defined? Should a book that respectfully, though forcefully, poses alternative explanations be ‘cancelled,’ effectively banned?

Can oral histories and science co-exist, let alone thrive together? Is it even possible to have an actual debate on residential schools and reconciliation?

Mel Rothenburger is a former regular contributor to CFJC-TV and CBC radio, publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a recipient of the Jack Webster Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. He has served as mayor of Kamloops, school board chair and TNRD director, and is a retired daily newspaper editor.  He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.