OP-ED: Learning the truth about “children’s graves” and residential schools is more important than ever

Tom Flanagan writes, "Dead Wrong was published because the struggle for accurate information on this contentious subject continues. Let me share with you a little of what’s in Dead Wrong."

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Author: Tom Flanagan

When the book Grave Error was published by True North in late 2023, it became an instant best-seller. People wanted to read the book because it contained well-documented information not readily available elsewhere concerning the history of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRS) and the facts surrounding recent claims about “unmarked graves.”

Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong is the just-published sequel to Grave Error. Edited by Chris Champion and me, with chapters written by knowledgeable academics, journalists, researchers and even several contributors who once worked directly in residential schools or dedicated Indian hospitals, Dead Wrong was published because the struggle for accurate information on this contentious subject continues. Let me share with you a little of what’s in Dead Wrong.

Outrageously, the New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper among liberals and “progressives”, has never retracted its outrageously false headline that “mass graves” were uncovered at Kamloops in 2021. Journalist Jonathan Kay exposes that scandal.

With similarly warped judgment, the legacy media were enthused about last year’s so-called documentary Sugarcane, a feature-length film sponsored by National Geographic and nominated for an Academy Award. The only reporter to spot Sugarcane’s dozens of egregious factual errors was independent journalist Michelle Stirling; her expose is included in Dead Wrong.

In spring 2024, the small Interior B.C. city of Quesnel made national news when the mayor’s wife bought ten copies of Grave Error for distribution to friends. After noisy protests by people who had never read the book, Quesnel city council voted to censure Mayor Ron Paull and tried to force him from office. It’s all described in Dead Wrong.

Also not to be forgotten is how the Law Society of B.C. has forced upon its members training materials that assert against all evidence that children’s remains have been discovered at Kamloops. As told by James Pew, B.C. MLA Dallas Brodie was expelled not from the NDP but from the Conservative caucus for daring to point out this obvious and incontrovertible falsehood. But the facts are that ground-penetrating radar (used at the former Kamloops IRS) can detect only “anomalies” or “disturbances”, not identify what those might be; that no excavations have been carried out; and that no human remains whatsoever, let alone “215 children’s bodies”, have been found there. Brodie is completely correct.

Then there is the story of Jim McMurtry, suspended by the Abbotsford District School Board shortly after the May 2021 Kamloops announcement. McMurtry’s offence was to tell students the truth that, while some Indigenous students did die in residential schools, the main cause was tuberculosis. His own book The Scarlet Lesson is excerpted in Dead Wrong.

Historian Ian Gentles and former IRS teacher Pim Wiebel offer a richly detailed analysis of health and medical conditions in the schools. They show that these were much better than what prevailed in the Indian reserves from which most students came.

Another important contribution to understanding the medical issues is by Dr. Eric Schloss, narrating the history of the Charles Camsell Indian Hospital in Edmonton. IRS facilities usually included small clinics, but students with serious problems were often transferred to Indian Hospitals for more intensive care. Schloss, who worked in the Camsell, describes how it delivered state-of-the-art medicine, probably better than the care available to most non-native children anywhere in Canada at the time.

Rodney Clifton’s contribution, “They would call me a ‘Denier,’” describes his personal experiences working in two IRS in the 1960s. Clifton does not tell stories of hunger, brutal punishment and suppression of Indigenous culture, but of games, laughter and trying to learn native languages from his Indian and Inuit charges.

And far from the IRS system being a deliberate, sustained program of cultural genocide, as Toronto lawyer and historian Greg Piasetzki explains, the historical fact is that “Canada Wanted to Close All Residential Schools in the 1940s. Here’s why it couldn’t.” That’s because for many Aboriginal parents, particularly single parents and/or those with large numbers of children, residential schools were the best deal available. In addition to schooling their kids, they offered paid employment to large numbers of Indigenous Canadians as cooks, janitors, farmers and health care workers, and later as teachers and even principals.

Another gravely important issue is the recent phenomenon of charging critics with “residential school denialism.” This is a false accusation hurled by true believers in what has become known as the “Kamloops narrative”, aimed at shutting down criticism or questions. A key event in this process was when NDP MP Leah Gazan in 2022 persuaded the House of Commons to approve a resolution “That, in the opinion of the House this government must recognize what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide.”

In 2024, Gazan took the next step by introducing a private member’s bill to criminalize dissent about the IRS system. Remember, the slur of “denialist” is a term drawn from earlier debates about the Holocaust. Gazan’s bill failed to pass, but she reintroduced it in 2025. Had such provisions been in force back in 2021, it might well have become a crime to point out that the Kamloops GPR survey had identified soil anomalies, not buried bodies. Frances Widdowson examines this sordid political campaign of denunciation.

As the proponents of the Kamloops narrative fail to provide convincing hard evidence for it, they hope to mobilize the authority of the state to stamp out dissent. One of the main goals behind publication of Dead Wrong is to head off this drive toward authoritarianism.

Happily, Dead Wrong is already an Amazon best-seller based on pre-publication orders. The struggle for truth continues.

The original, full-length version of this article was recently published by C2C Journal.

Tom Flanagan is the author of many books on Indigenous history and policy, including (with C.P. Champion) the best-selling Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us and the Truth about Residential Schools.