OP-ED: The legacy media’s failed efforts at truth-telling about residential schools
Hymie Rubenstein writes, "Half-truths or outright distortions dominate mainstream media reports about Canada’s Indian Residential Schools."
By: Hymie Rubenstein
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
That half-truths or outright distortions dominate mainstream media reports about Canada’s Indian Residential Schools has once more been verified by the contents of two recent pieces commemorating the fifth anniversary of a May 27, 2021, announcement that reverberated around the world. That was the day the chief of British Columbia’s Kamloops Indian Band declared war on the foundation of Canadian truth-telling, a once-cherished, universally applicable doctrine grounded in Western-rooted Enlightenment notions of scientifically verified, potentially falsifiable empirical evidence:
It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwé pemc [Kamloops Indian Band] Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” stated Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir.
As we have known since nearly the beginning (see here, here, here, here, here, and here), nothing could be further from the truth. Not only have the “preliminary findings” never been documented, but their veracity has also been repeatedly challenged by an abundance of contrary evidence, the most compelling of which is that no family member whose child attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School has ever reported the name of a missing student who never returned home.
Equally telling, taken at face value and supported by other evidence, this announcement says that mysterious localized indigenous ‘knowings’ consisting of unproven assertions held by unknown aboriginal knowledge keepers take precedence over facts discovered, revealed, and transmitted using scientific methodology rooted in the principles and practice of falsifiability.
No better examples of the complicity of the mainstream media in accepting and spreading indigenous gossip, rumours, myths, and unsubstantiated allegations can be found than in the following editorials from Canada’s two leading national newspapers, the National Post and the Globe and Mail.
According to Ari David Blaff, a reporter with the National Post:
Sexual abuse was prevalent. Over 30,000 claims of sexual abuse or sexual assault have been filed by former students, with $2.8 billion in compensation paid as of April 2015.
The residential school system was “a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples,” the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] concluded in volume 4 of its report.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission said that as many as 6,000 Indigenous children died in the system, which included 139 schools over the century and a half they operated in Canada. The rate of Indigenous children dying in the first decades of the residential school system was high mostly due to tuberculosis and influenza. Many children’s bodies were never returned home.
As for the Globe and Mail’s Editorial Board opinion piece:
Two things can be true, at the same time. Five years after the startling announcement that there were hundreds of possible unmarked graves near a residential school in Kamloops, B.C., there has been no public confirmation of the discovery of any human remains. That is reality, one reality.
Another is this: 3,200 Indigenous children, at least, died at residential schools, according to the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Residential school students died at a rate far higher than children in the rest of Canada – a negligence so deep-rooted that it came “within unpleasant nearness” of manslaughter, according to a government official in the early 1900s.
Many students were physically abused or sexually abused. And all were the target of a systemic effort by the Canadian government, over decades, to snatch them from their homes and families, and to eradicate their culture and heritage. That, too, is reality, a damning reality.
What neither the National Post news story nor the Globe and Mail editorial mentions is that a 2003 Native Indian Residential Schools Task Force found that:
“ … outright allegations of murder to deaths caused by negligence, and even included allegations that babies were being killed and buried on the school grounds [in British Columbia] … were thoroughly investigated by both the Task Force and the applicable Sub-Division Major Crime Unit. Not one of these allegations has ever been substantiated, much less proven, and in many cases, investigation has established that the death was due to either disease or some other natural cause: in some cases, the alleged victim was found to be alive several years after his supposed death.”
Nor is there any mention in the 2015 TRC Report of thousands of missing children buried in unmarked graves in unknown cemeteries.
What both opinion pieces also ignore or are unaware of is that some truths are more veracious than others, and that so-called balanced reports – presenting the divergent positions of different parties – are not necessarily unproblematic, especially when the broader context is deliberately ignored.
Sexual abuse, for example, has always been ‘prevalent’ in boarding schools, including those attended by the offspring of wealthy parents, a factual assertion never mentioned by the mainstream media.
Also, the education of the children of non-English or French-speaking immigrants has always been intended to assimilate them into mainstream society and culture. This remains true today as it was in the past. The best proof is that as many parents as can afford to do so have often sent their children to private schools associated with their ethnic or religious background.
Equally important, the figure of 6,000 Indigenous students who died in residential schools is a crude estimate, while the 3,200 figure is deceptive: most deaths occurred after children were taken to regional hospitals or after returning home following exposure to European diseases to which indigenous people had little or no natural immunity. Moreover, students often entered their boarding schools already infected with diseases, especially tuberculosis, contracted in their overcrowded and poverty-stricken reserve homes.
Finally, dead children were returned home to their families for burial whenever possible.
Indeed, the TRC Report was more circumspect than either the National Post or the Globe and Mail about these issues:
Some students died at the schools, while other seriously ill children were returned home, or admitted to hospitals or sanatoria where some may have later died. Some of the deceased were returned to their families for burial, but most others were likely buried in cemeteries on school grounds, or in nearby church, reserve or municipal cemeteries. We have no clear sense of the relative frequency with which these alternatives were employed.
In fact, there is now clear evidence about these issues for many of the schools, as carefully documented by star researcher Nina Green. Conversely, the TRC neglected to systematically study the thousands of death records of IRS students.
As for the National Post and the Globe and Mail, the “damning reality” of both pieces is their equal indifference to nuanced, contextualized truth-telling, compounded by the most damning reality of all: there is not a single documented case of an indigenous child being murdered by caretakers at an Indian Residential School during its 113 years of government funding and oversight.
To be sure, Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were imperfect institutions, marked by chronic underfunding and inappropriate curricula, especially in their early years. Discipline was often harsh, but no harsher than in other residential schools during the same era. Even so, despite these shortcomings, few countries have done more to protect the well-being and future opportunities of their indigenous children.
