Does one of Canada's key Residential School Denialists have a track record as a long-time conspiracy theorist?
Nina Green, Residential School Denier & Nina Green, Shakespeare Denier
In May, 2021, there was a discovery of a graveyard at Kamloops Residential School in BC that caused seismic shock waves throughout Canada - Canada discovering its own past, recognizing the truth that many First Nations children died at Residential Schools.
In response, there has been a far-right conservative denialism, much of which focuses around trying to either minimize or justify what happened, when there is no question that children died, often due to negligence, even after authorities were warned.
More than a century ago, authorities offered the same denials that are being repeated today about the grievous and lasting harm of residential schools and provincial child and family services seizing children in the thousands, just in the last few years.
What’s even more bizarre, however is that it should be completely obvious how it was possible to ignore what was happening at Residential Schools when we are ignoring exactly the same things happening today, except it is child and family services taking children away - far more children than were ever taken under Residential schools, with similar tragic outcomes.
The Historical Record on Residential Schools
In 1907, Dr. Peter Bryce described the death rate in Residential Schools as a “National Crime,” - “An Appeal for Justice” for the First Nations of Canada.
Part of what he pointed out was that while First Nations children were dying at incredible rates from infectious diseases, that governments were successfully finding ways to contain outbreaks with proper measures in Ontario.
It was not a secret report. Newspapers and major magazines wrote about it, and they even interviewed the Principal of the Residential School in Brandon, where 25 children had died, and where students endured forced labour, while underdressed, in cold Manitoba spring weather. The number of children dying at the school was so great that the Principal of the day, Rev. Thompson Ferrier, asked that a new graveyard be built.
At the time – in 1907, Ferrier minimized the deaths by saying the report had math wrong, when he was the one in the wrong.
Nothing changed – and Ferrier continued to force children to work, poorly dressed, in bad weather, for years.
“In 1915, parents refused to return children to the Norway House, Manitoba, school at the start of the school year because of complaints over the school’s lack of food and poor quality of clothing in the previous year. Methodist Church representative [Thompson] T. Ferrier reminded Chief Berens, “These children can be taken back to the school by the Department, in spite of whether the parents are willing or not now that they have been entered as pupils of the school.”
There is also no question that children were buried two to a grave:
“In 1914, “new Red Deer principal, J. F. Woodsworth, wrote letters to parents who had not sent their children back to school after the summer vacation that informed them that if the children were not returned within a week, “I shall send a policeman to bring them.” Later that month, he issued a warrant for the arrest of fifteen runaway students. By 1919, the school was in state of crisis brought on by chronic underfunding and a devastating bout of influenza.”
That influenza was the “Spanish Flu,” which killed millions around the world and was incredibly deadly on many First Nations. The death rate on some isolated reserves reached 95%.
“There had been no doctor at all to visit the sick at Red Deer Industrial School that November. The Principal, J. Woodsworth, who had been ill along with the students and staff, sent along word to the Departmental Secretary, J.D. McLean, that five children had perished: Georgina House, Jane Baptiste, Sarah Secsay, David Lightning, and William Cardinal, who had died of the sickness “as a runaway from the school.”
Conditions were “nothing less than criminal. We have no isolation ward and no hospital equipment of any kind. “At the height of the sickness, without medical attention, “the dead, the dying, the sick and convalescent, were all together” in the same room. “You must,” he pleaded, “put this school in shape to fulfil its function as an educational institution. At present it is a disgrace.”
It was not the only disgrace. Because no one had recovered sufficiently to bury the children in the school cemetery, the Red Deer undertaker had to be summoned. Woodsworth assured McLean, however, that he had kept a watchful eye on expenses. ‘I directed the undertaker to be as careful as possible in his charge, so he gave them a burial as near as possible to that of a pauper. They are buried two in a grave.”
It is also no question that Thompson Ferrier, the Brandon Residential School Principal, held racist and pseudoscientific views: he put them in writing. Here, he is favourably quoted in a Strangers Within Our Gates, by J.S. Woodsworth.
Ferrier’s views were not just his - he was a Reverend in the Methodist church, which ran Residential schools across Western Canada, and the Methodist Church in particular adopted and promoted eugenics. In 2016, the United Methodist Church in the US issued a statement of repentance for its historic support and promotion of eugenics:
“Methodist bishops endorsed one of the first books circulated to the US churches promoting eugenics. Unlike the battles over evolution and creationism, both conservative and progressive church leaders endorsed eugenics. The liberal Rev. Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics and a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, writing in Eugenics, the magazine of the American Eugenic Society, said that Christianity and eugenics were compatible because both pursued the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”2
“Ironically, as the Eugenics Movement came to the United States, the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.
Methodist churches around the country promoted the American Eugenics Society “Fitter Family Contests” wherein the fittest families were invariably fair skinned and well off.
Methodists were active on the planning committees of the Race Betterment Conferences held in 1914, and 1915.4 In the 1910s, Methodist churches hosted forums in their churches to discuss eugenics. In the 1920s, many Methodist preachers submitted their eugenics sermons to contests hosted by the American Eugenics Society. By 1927, when the American Eugenics Society formed its Committee on the Cooperation with Clergymen, Bishop Francis McConnell, president of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, served on the committee. In 1936, he would chair the roundtable discussion on Religion and Eugenics at the American Eugenics Society Meeting.
The laity of the church also took up the cause of eugenics. In 1929, the Methodist Review published the sermon “Eugenics: A Lay Sermon” by George Huntington Donaldson. In the sermon, Donaldson argues, “the strongest and the best are selected for the task of propagating the likeness of God and carrying on his work of improving the race.”
While the more recent focus has been on the Catholic Church, Methodism was the single largest protestant denomination in Canada, and it was entrenched in the Federal Residential School bureaucracy.
Sectarian religious hatreds flourished in Canada, and many of Canada’s protestant denominations supported and promoted eugenics. It is often mentioned that prominent figures like Nellie McClung and Emily Murphy of Canada’s “Famous Five”, who both helped ensure women were recognized as full persons under the law, both endorsed eugenics.
It has to be said that while these have treated as strictly personal opinions, it obscures the ways in which these are expression of ideas being promoted within their faith. Emily Murphy’s husband was a Reverend in the Anglican Church, and McClung was a Methodist.
In 1922, Bryce re-released his report, because nothing had changed. The Federal Government refused to spend money to make Residential Schools safe to keep children from dying the way they successfully did in cities like Ottawa and Hamilton. The high death rates were due to neglect.
These are facts that are not in dispute.
Residential Schools were conceived as a way of erasing Indigenous identity. The religious organizations believed this was necessary, and said as much.
It was also for the political purpose of “clearing the plains” especially in Western Canada, where hundreds of thousands of square kilometres of agricultural land was available for free to immigrant settlers who would stay and farm it.
At the same time, First Nations on reserve were subjected to a “pass system” that limited the ability of adults to leave their reserves, while requiring that children be taken to schools, whether they wanted their children to go or not.
It was for the express purpose of forcing them to integrate with another culture. For immigrants, this is expected - you move to another country, and you take on the language and customs.
There are two critically reasons this is specifically different for Indigenous people, in a real very real and legal sense - that for Indigenous people, assimilation means surrender of their legal rights and claims under Treaty.
It means the policy of national and provincial governments is to punish people for their identity - of being Indigenous, in the only land they and their people have ever known, on the territory of their forebears.
Yet on their own territory, religious ceremonies were banned, people were punished for speaking their own language. They were denied many of the promises of the treaties, including land in Manitoba that was promised more than a century ago.
All of that is trying to erase everything about who a people are. It still is, when people make plans for how Indigenous people should assimilate into a foreign culture on their own territory.
In order to enjoy all of the civil and human rights available to Canadians, First Nations and other Indigenous people who are “treaty” would have to surrender their identity.
That is what they had to do in the past. Indigenous veterans, who fought to free Europe in the First and Second World Wars (and who had a long history, as Bryce noted, of fighting side-by-side with Canadians as warriors) returned home and could vote, but only so long as they gave up treaty. First Nation veterans were denied pensions.
What Canada and its provinces have done to Indigenous people is terrible, and it continues to be terrible, and coming to grips with it, and addressing it is the problem.
Part of the reason why we have such trouble navigating this history is exactly what Annett gets wrong.
Annett’s accusations of direct, targeted and malicious crimes, motivated by hatred. The framing is of exceptional villains committing terrible crimes.
The reality is harder to take, which is that the system has been harmful to Indigenous people when functioning as it was intended to and crafted by politicians, bureaucrats and people of faith who are admired and even revered today.
Part of the difficulty of dealing with harm like this is that it is not perpetrated by cartoon villains. It is what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil” when she described the trial of Eichmann.
The harm of how Indigenous people have been treated, and continue to be treated in and by Canadian governments is shocking.
No one recognizes the shocking harm that is created when you take thousands of children away from their families - what the impacts are on the families and communities left behind, as well as on the child, all while blaming the families and the communities.
And for this reason, the fact that for decades, Canadian governments have been tearing Indigenous families apart, seizing their children to be raised by others, only to be abandoned on the street, and treating them as “separate.”
Continually taking children away from a particular group of people to be raised in another culture is generally recognized as being a practice of ending that culture for future generations.
So we get denials, and the entire debate about facts - and the present is being derailed because two sets of conspiracy theorists are fighting about their own fictional accounts of the past, instead of accepting the historical reality and evidence.
The Historical Record vs. Two Conspiracy Theorists
Now, there has been some confusion sown because of the claims by a former Minister named Kevin Annett. Annett is a defrocked Presbyterian Minister, originally from Edmonton. It has to be said that Annett is not a reliable researcher or narrator, because he has made many claims that are unquestionably and provably false.
As an example: his claims to have arrested and successfully tried the Pope and Queen Elizabeth II, through a made-up organization he created.
The International Common Law Court of Justice (ICLCJ) is convened by the ITCCS to charge Pope Benedict, Queen Elizabeth and 28 other defendants with committing and concealing Genocide, in July 2012. Kevin serves as the chief advisor to the Prosecutor.
Pope Benedict (Joseph Ratzinger) resigns from his office just before the ICLCJ verdict finds him guilty and sentenced to arrest and imprisonment in February 2013, after the Spanish government notifies Benedict that he could face arrest based on the ICLCJ evidence. Three other top Vatican officials named in the ICLCJ indictment also resign.
The ICLCJ is Kevin Annett. There is no actual court.
There are lots of problems with Annett’s account, even before it goes off the rails.
Annett starts his own story with arriving to be Minister in a BC town, and wonders why his church congregation is entirely white, while Indigenous people are left out. He is still looking for Indigenous people to convert and “save”.
One irony is that Annett is operating squarely in the tradition of the radical protestant evangelicals who ran the Residential Schools, who despised and Catholicism and the Catholic Church and opposed the Anglican Church as well.
The second irony is that, even as he cites instances of sterilization and eugenics, he is unaware that these were policies promoted by protestant Churches in Canada, and passed by protestant politicians in Western Canada. The Catholic Church and the Pope apologized for their role in Residential Schools and the abuse of students. There is no question however, that the Catholic opposed sterilization and eugenics.
However, we should be absolutely clear: discrediting Kevin Annett changes nothing about the indisputable historical record of neglect and harm at Residential Schools, as well as the ongoing neglect and harm of Indigenous families, communities and children that has never stopped to this day.
We do not need to embellish what happened.
When you look at the counter-claims of Residential School denialists, they are ignoring the historical record (some of which I included above) that details neglect and deaths at Residential Schools.
Nina Green: Oxfordian?
This brings us to the cottage industry of counter-conspiracy theorists.
That’s surprisingly hard to tell. You would think that with an issue as seismic as the reaction to Residential Schools, the “authorities” listed above might want to double check the claims made by someone whose identity and credentials are really completely unknown.
The only other independent researcher you can find when you look up “Nina Green, Independent Researcher” is the one who is a “Noted Oxfordian Researcher.”
Now, this does not mean “a researcher from Oxford University.”
You really have to be willing to bend reality to buy that, because DeVere died in 1604, whereas Shakespeare died in 1616.
Now, the list of people who believe this theory is long, but from the very beginning, it was always a fantasy, driven in part by people’s misunderstandings and ignorance of Shakespeare’s life and history, which we now better understand.
I think the simple mistake in reasoning behind all conspiracy theories is assuming the outcome.
Conspiracy theorists assume based on a rules, not on reality. So if reality doesn’t conform to the assumption, reality gets rejected.
People who are exceptionally talented are often surrounded by various myths. People can’t imagine that one person could really be that talented or brilliant, so they must have had help from people who were important.
The conspiracy theorists argue that there is no way that Shakespeare could have written his plays, given his social and educational background. There is a bizarre assumption that as a writer, he needed to personally experience and travel to other lands.
One key thing that people fail to understand is that Shakespeare wasn’t sitting down with a blank page and inventing everything. If plays were songs, Shakespeare would have been doing a lot of covers. He was adapting other plays. He wasn’t coming up with everything from scratch. And he probably didn’t invent as many of the words people think he did. It’s just that when they were pulling dictionaries together, if they found it in Shakespeare, they didn’t look deeper.
The phenomenon of conspiracy theorists is that they feel their knowledge gives them a kind of superiority - that they have access to a greater truth - as if they are more knowing, when, to the contrary, it’s some form of anti-knowledge.
It actually takes away from the debate. If an “independent researcher” is only looking for information that supports their argument, and ignores evidence that should warrant changing perspective or interpretation, then, that’s not going to produce accurate information.
A pile of facts and evidence on its own is only part of the work of collecting accurate information. Placing these facts and evidence in the historical and political and even personal context is required for an accurate understanding of what happened.
Sometimes, that means suspending or withholding judgment, and evaluating multiple possible interpretations. It also means trying to get that interpretive framework right.
That’s what people mean when they talk about “critical thinking” and other methods for evaluating historical evidence.
I am saying this as someone who spent years at university in my undergraduate and graduate degrees dealing with and learning about these very issues. I studied critical theory, history, philosophy, including in graduate school.
This is the problem with many “independent researchers” and conspiracy theorists. Even when they have some facts right, they jump to the wrong conclusions.
Nina Green the Oxfordian is ignoring documentary evidence, and so is Nina Green the Residential School Independent Researcher.
We’re Still Denying the Present: 70 years of CFS
There is still a very serious problem with the entire Residential School debate, which is that we are ignoring the current systems that continue to brutalize Indigenous people in Canada, especially provincial government systems where Indigenous people face the most discrimination.
The neglect, forced labour, inadequate nutrition and dangerous living conditions at Residential Schools were known and written about at the time, and yet there was no action. It went on for decades.
The last Residential School closed in the 1990s. Enrolment peaked decades before that. That does not mean things got better, or that the harm being inflicted on Indigenous people stopped.
It is not just “intergenerational trauma” that Indigenous people are experiencing, because the trauma is happening right now.
Because the debate is about Residential Schools, we are ignoring the truly horrific treatment of Indigenous people by child and family services, justice and health care systems run by provincial governments.
There was a fundamental shift in the early 1950s. At the request of some provinces, responsibility for First Nations child and family services was transferred from the Federal Government to provincial governments.
As a result, instead of seizing First Nations Children and putting them in schools, they were seized and adopted out across North America and as far away as Europe. Then they were being seized by CFS.
In Manitoba, there has been tragedy after tragedy associated with CFS.
For decades, there have not been enough foster parents to look after all the children and infants who were being seized. As a consequence, some children were housed in downtown hotels for weeks or months at a time, or in jail.
Children running away is one of the most common calls for Winnipeg police, and it is known that there are criminal predators who prey on youth in CFS to recruit them into gangs or prostitution. This sometimes included CFS workers - one was charged with trafficking three women. Another was charged with sexually assaulting women in a group home. In another incident, a volunteer was charged with sexual assault of a minor. A former police officer and CFS worker was charged with sexual assault.
There have been multiple high-profile tragedies, including the murder of Phoenix Sinclair, a five-year-old, and the death of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year old whose lifeless body was found in the Red River.
The lives of these children and their families - and the systems that failed them - have been detailed in public reports.
There was an inquiry into why Brian Sinclair, an Indigenous man, died after 36-hours in an ER without ever being seen. He was sent because he needed medical treatment, but it was assumed he was homeless (he was not) using substances (he was not).
Here are some details from a Winnipeg Free Press story from December, 2008.
In the ensuing years, the situation got much worse - not better.
“Between March 2006 and December 21, 2008 16 children died in the care of CFS.
Tragic figures:
Deaths of children in care since Phoenix Sinclair was found in March 2006:
16 total
5 accidental
6 suicides
2 homicides
2 undetermined
1 co-sleeping
Kids in care
2006 – 6,629 children
2007 – 7,241 children
2008 – 7,837 children
70 per cent: number of kids in care who are from First Nations (as of March 31, 2008)
9 per cent – Métis
6 per cent – First Nations (non-status)
14 per cent – Not aboriginal
Social workers
Number of front-line workers hired since Phoenix’s remains found – 99
Total: 697 front-line social workers
Funding
$242,893,800: Provincial budget for child welfare in 2007-08.
$89,851,600: Provincial budget for child welfare in 1997-98.
170 per cent: Increase in provincial child-welfare budget in last decade.
$48 million: Increase since Phoenix’s death.
($42 million in funding to agencies plus $6 million for foster families)”
Since this article ran in 2008, the number of children being seized in Manitoba soared.
At one point, the Province of Manitoba was seizing a newborn baby a day, every day, for years on end. In 2015, four out of five people reported missing in Manitoba are Indigenous children in CFS.
This is reflected in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Its first five calls, of 94 recommendations, are all related to children in the custody of CFS.
In the last 60 years, the 60s scoop and child and family services have still been taking away children from parents. In the last 20 years, there was a 2000s scoop, where the number of children taken by the Manitoba Government reached over 10,000 in custody.
No jurisdiction in the world was taking more children away from parents.
Other provinces have done it as well, though to a lesser degree.
This has happened as, and because, Indigenous people have been separated off and denied many rights the rest of have taken for granted.
From 2006-2019, the Government of Manitoba seized all the Federal Child Benefits from Indigenous Children in Care, approximately $338-million worth. In 2020, the Government of Manitoba in its budget included a clause to keep all the funds and to provide legal immunity to everyone who was responsible. It was overturned with a court case, but no one has been compensated. There are individual children who within the last 20 years had $90,000 in benefits seized by the provincial government, who may now be living on the streets or the Salvation Army.
Today, over 50% of the 1200+ people who are homeless on the streets of Winnipeg were in CFS.
The Province of Manitoba just recently settled a case for $530-million
We need to bring the discussion about the realities of the way Indigenous people have been treated by our governments - it is creating suffering and forced poverty.
For the people who are don’t want to believe this, or who want to dismiss, this, or who want to complain that this is a “change in the culture”.
It’s not that values have changed. We know that because when Bryce called Residential Schools “a national crime” it was 1907. It was wrong then, and Bryce knew it, and it was denied and minimized, and the suffering kept happening.
We should all realize that we’ve been lied to - we’ve been presented with a very sanitized version of Canadian history. People’s decisions led to harm and they didn’t want to get caught, so they kept denying and glossing over it, so the problem isn’t even spoken of, much less acknowledged.
Of course, there are people who are proud of our country and want to feel good about it who are upset by these revelations.
That is the appropriate response - distress that such a thing could happen. The next appropriate response is to work towards a remedy, when instead we get mired in decimal.
Of course, it feels good to have that kind of pride in what we all share. We have to accept that the way Canada and its provinces have actually treated Indigenous people is wrong - and it is upsetting, and we can all recognize and acknowledge that, and by doing that, we can take steps to living up to our own stated values, and work with Indigenous people in a way that expresses the best of who we are.
Denying this reality only delays the day of reckoning.
I want to believe in Canada as the best country in the world, by recognizing this wrong and making amends for it, because until we do that, the harm will keeps happening.
When these terrible things happen, leaders sometimes say “this is not who we are.”
We need to be honest with ourselves - this is who we are, and who we have been, whether we like it or not. However, we are changeable. It’s up to us to make it right, so we are living the values we are proud of.
We have failed to live up to our own values - and the way Indigenous people have been treated are not the stated founding values of either Canada or Manitoba.
The historical and present day treatment First Nations is the shabby and sometimes brutal reality, and it has to be said that these failures truly are at odds with the defining and founding values of both Canada and Manitoba, which are defined by individual human rights, democracy, and the recognition of collective diversity.
Our shared civic nationalism - is the bond of many peoples surviving together in peace. And what it takes to survive together in peace transcends our differences.
That requires a shared understanding of history. Not conspiracy theories.
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