Carney’s dad called Indigenous children “culturally retarded” in CBC interview

Mark Carney’s father, Robert Carney–a former residential school principal–made several comments that would likely be considered “residential school denialism.”

Source: Facebook

Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s father, Robert Carney–a former residential school principal–made several comments that would likely be considered “residential school denialism” and referred to Indigenous children as “culturally retarded," in a decades-old CBC interview.

The CBC re-released an interview with the Liberal leader’s dad which originally aired in 1965 where he called many students in his residential school program at Joseph B Terrell School in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, “culturally retarded.”

At that time, Mark Carney was an infant living in NT, making him Canada’s first prime minister to have been born in the territories. Carney’s father was the principal superintendent at a federal residential school. CBC-Radio interviewed him about a special program at his school for “culturally retarded children.”

“Culturally retarded child in the context of the Northwest Territories, is a child from a native background, for various reasons, has not been regular attendance at school,” Carney said. “He’s from a language background other than English, and who is behind, in school say three or four years.”

He then went on to explain that there would be many children across the country who could be labelled as “culturally retarded” and “certainly in the U.S.”

“In the large cities in the eastern United States, Among Negro groups make many examples of cultural retardation and programs that have been developed to meet their needs, to try and upgrade their skills and bring them into contact with the dominant culture,” he said.

The program Carney described resembled the predecessor of special needs programs available today, where students wouldn’t benefit from being in a class of peers much older than themselves to receive the education they need.

“We realize, because of this cultural retardation, that many of these children will not progress through the regular grade structure,” he continued. “They will not go to high school, and in all probability, they will return to their communities, remain with their families, and go out into the bush and continue the old way of life.”

He said the program was intended not to take them away from their native culture but to give them the skills and knowledge to assimilate into the dominant Canadian society or to bring those skills back to their communities.

A look at his previous writing shows that Carney criticized the first Indigenous-led commission against the residential schools program. In a review of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which laid the groundwork for many future reconciliation initiatives and inquiries. At the time, Carney criticized the report for ignoring what he called the positive contributions that came out of the school system.

He said as a result of the “Aboriginal perspective” which “dominates everything said in the report,” residential schools are “invariably cast in an unfavourable light.” He said that whenever the schools are mentioned, they are found “almost without exception” to have lacked the provision of acceptable care or education.

He said that often, the reason for a lack of funding in certain schools was the lack of financial support from Indigenous people themselves and that the objectives of the schools should not be cast as “wholly destructive or ill-intended.” He said the programs were “intended to help Native people to adjust to a changing environment.”

“The schools’ objectives, policies and practices are identified as a systematic strategy of cultural repression which was accompanied by an extraordinary amount of sexual, physical and emotional abuse,” Carney said of the report. “This is clearly a slanted account of these institutions, and therefore should be viewed cautiously because, to cite one of its problems, it tells only part of the story.”

To the claim that children were removed from their homes and placed under the care of strangers, Carney said the report “provided little evidence to support its conclusion.”

“It states that among the efforts made by church and government officials to recruit as many pupils as possible are those which proposed extraordinary measures to ensure that the maximum pupillages were achieved,” he said. “These included threats to cut the rations of recalcitrant parents, to suspend family allowances and to enforce severe penalties under the compulsory attendance sections of the Indian Act. Evidence is seldom presented to substantiate statements that such draconian measures were a matter of course.”

Last year NDP MP Leah Gazan put forward a bill, Bill C-413, to criminalize anyone who publishes content which “wilfully promotes hatred against Indigenous peoples by condoning, denying, downplaying or justifying the Indian residential school system in Canada or by misrepresenting facts relating to it is guilty of an of an indictable offence.”

The comments by Carney’s father would likely fall under the bill if it passed and he had expressed these views today.

A spokesperson for the former Liberal Justice Minister Arif Virani told True North at the time that Virani was grateful to Gazan for “raising an important issue and looked forward to reviewing the bill in parliament.

The spokesperson also told True North that Virani found the Independent Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray’s report, which advocated for the criminalization of “residential school denialism,” a “critical” legal framework to preserve and protect the rights of residential school students and their families.