The Wall Street Journal is the Latest Conservative Mouthpiece to be Duped by A Residential School Conspiracy Theorist
The WSJ joins the Fraser Institute, Jonathan and Barbara Kay, Conrad Black, Tom Flanagan and Brian Giesbrecht in being duped by a "Independent Researcher" who is a conspiracy theorist
I just came across an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that repeats some of the sloppier disinformation about Canadian history that’s being passed around. “Canada’s Unproven Mass-Grave Scandal: Progressives want to outlaw ‘denialism,’ but no actual remains have been found.”
The article has clearly been sourced from a batch of right-wing media outlets in Canada who are repeating the claims assembled in a book called “Grave Error” by Tom Flanagan - an historian and former Chief of Staff to former Conservative Leader and Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, and C.P. Champion, who worked for Jason Kenney, former Premier of Alberta and Federal Conservative Minister of Immigration.
First, to directly address both the headline and the claims - which are profoundly deceptive, for the following reasons:
What was at issue was children in a graveyard at a Residential School, not “mass graves”. In May, 2021, there was a discovery of a graveyard at Kamloops Residential School in BC that caused seismic shock waves throughout Canada. However, neither the First Nation in question nor the Government of Canada referred to them as “mass graves.” There is no question that children died at school and were buried in graveyards.
There is irrefutable evidence that many children died at Residential Schools. As far as back as 1907, Residential Schools were publicly being called “A National Crime” because of the death rates. There are records - letters, reports - of forced labor, there was deprivation, and it is documented that there were times that children were buried two to a grave, to save money. Despite the 1907 report, nothing changed or improved, and it had to be re-released in 1922. It also has to be said that while Residential Schools were shut down for good in the 1990s, and the Federal Government started to wind them down in the 1950s, the provincial Child and Family Welfare Agencies that followed have been seizing thousands of Indigenous children a year, with results every bit as tragic, and on a larger scale, than Residential Schools.
Third, the suggestion of criminalizing Residential School Denial means we should be very clear about what that means, and clear on the history. And there is no question that we are ignoring huge swaths of important history. We have largely been ignoring the role of Protestant churches, and the major figures in those churches who promoting and ran Residential Schools, which means ignoring half their history. While we’ve acknowleged the 60s scoop, we’re not talking about the last 30 years when child apprehensions reached record levels. Last year, more Indigenous children were taken than ever before.
So, the headline and the substance of the Wall Street Journal’s article is false. Mass graves are not the issue. Children were forcibly taken from their parents with the purpose of cutting them off from their language and culture, in order to indoctrinate them, in conditions that were often criminally negligent, and continued despite years of complaints. It has not stopped.
There are many, many reasons why Indigenous people live in poverty, and it can be described as “forced poverty” because, as some have argued, it is like living under sanctions, or being forced to live in a permanent state of austerity and poverty, because that is how their rights have been defined in Canada, which was their own territory. While we have treaties, as one example, First Nations are routinely excluded from revenue sharing from resource extraction on their own land - dams, mines, oilwells - while facing the costs of disruption and environmental damage.
And part of that - has been informed by an attitude towards Indigenous people that still comes from the specific protestant ideology which treated them as wayward, but needing correction, when it was being demanded that they correct their identity.
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 for the express purpose of forcing them to integrate with another culture.
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.
For Indigenous people, assimilation means surrender of their legal rights and claims under Treaty, when they haven’t actually been fulfilled. There are commitments made by governments 150 years ago that have not been met.
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.
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 sad 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.
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: Residential School Denier’s Favourite Independent Researcher. Also, a conspiracy theorist.
Here’s the of “essayists” featured in the book “Grave Error” which has been promoted heavily by Conservatives. Green is often mentioned, and the one thing these essays all have in common is that their scholarship is shit, because they are not engaged in history at all. They are engaged in constructing propaganda.
I say that as someone who, during the course of my academic non-career as an undergraduate and graduate, as well as as a lecture, that you have a professional obligation to avoid fallacies, check your sources and go where the evidence leads.
The quality of Green’s research is suspect, but so is this basic piece of reasoning.
There is no doubt that children died at school, and that there were graveyards at the schools. There’s also no doubt that Canada’s Medical Officer, Dr. Peter Bryce, in 1907, described conditions and death rates at the school as a “National Crime” and again in 1922.
The people who - perhaps fittingly - wrote “Grave Error” seem to think if they weren’t mass graves, than there is no concern to be had about schools were so many students died that they needed a graveyard - a graveyard that sometimes needed expanding.
That is an astonishing moral blind spot. But it’s also a failure of logic.
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.
Conspiracy theories also often have a kind of a heroic us-against-the-world drama associated with them that also treat people as moral monsters and themselves as noble warriors. There’s a kind of romance and excitment to it - and, even when the conspiracy is horrific, a kind of certainty that offers the conspiracy theorist some comfort - someone, somewhere is actually charge. Some of this is people thinking that “everything happens for a reason” - which drives out the existential fear that comes with accepting the randomness of our existence and the universe by injecting morality. It’s a kind of superhero world, and what it misses is that with certainty comes pride, at the cost of humility. The person who believes they can never be bad is the one who is certain to be, because they will do bad for the best of reasons.
Now, this raises the question of just who this Nina Green is. There is another independent researcher you can find when you look up “Nina Green, Independent Researcher” is the one who is a “Noted Oxfordian Researcher.” Nina’s e-mail address is with Telus, a Canadian telecom company headquartered out of Alberta.
Now, this does not mean “a researcher from Oxford University.” An “Oxfordian” is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the works of William Shakespeare were actually written by the Earl Of Oxford, Edward DeVere.
It really is an incredibly idiotic conspiracy theory, because we’re supposed to believe that the Earl of Oxford for some reason could not reveal himself as Shakespeare, but had to spread secret hints through plays and poems. Also, DeVere died in 1604, whereas Shakespeare died in 1616.
As someone who actually studied and enjoyed quite a lot of Shakespeare at the graduate level, there are a million reasons this does not qualify as scholarship. It’s based in barmy ideas. One of the reasons Shakespeare wrote so many plays of such incredible range is he wasn’t sitting down with a blank page and inventing everything. If plays were songs, Shakespeare would have been doing a lot of covers.
The hard thing with conspiracy theories is that they are often voluminous, but they are missing a simple point that sends everything crashing down. Like the actual Shakespeare writing plays for years after the Earl of Oxford died, or the fact that the deaths at Residential schools have been documented, and are in fact, underdocumented.
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.
"There are a number of instances where the only mention of a specific student death is in a church document, but there is no recorded indication of it in any Indian Affairs document that the Commission could locate. There also exists the possibility that the death may not have been reported at all. As late as 1942, the principal of a residential school in Saskatchewan was unaware of any responsibility to report a death to provincial vital statistics officials. Many residential schools housed significant numbers of Métis students during their history. In some cases, the federal government provided funding for these students; in other cases, it did not. It is not clear if the schools reported on the deaths of unfunded Métis students at the schools.
As well, many records have simply been destroyed. According to a 1933 federal government policy, school returns could be destroyed after five years and reports of accidents could be destroyed after ten years. This led to the destruction of fifteen tons of paper. Between 1936 and 1944, 200,000 Indian Affairs files were destroyed.”
So,
Sometimes schools and churches recorded deaths but the government didn’t. So we know there are deaths, because they are in one set of documents.
Sometimes Principals didn’t know they had to report deaths to the government, at all, which means that students who died at school would have been buried without notifying further officials.
200,000 Indian Affairs files were destroyed, but provincial and other archives are intact.
The report goes on:
"As of November 2014, the Commission had identified 2,040 students in its Named Register for the period from 1867 to 2000. When combined with the figures in the Unnamed Register, the total is 3,201 deaths. The majority of deaths took place prior to 1940. In the pre-1940 era, there were 1,150 deaths for which no name was provided. In the post-1940 period, there are forty-four death reports that do not provide the student’s name.”
After 1950, as the Federal Government started the long wind-down of Residential Schools, responsibility for child and family services was transferred to the provinces, who started seizing children from First Nations and Indigenous families, and adopting them out across North America and around the world.
The Protestant Churches & CFS
Part of the reason why we have such trouble navigating this history is exactly what Annett gets wrong.
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.
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, as crafted by politicians, bureaucrats and people of faith who are admired and even revered today.
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.
In just eight years, from 1898 to 1906, 25 children died while living at the school, which required children to work half-days of unpaid labour to help pay for the school’s operation. The school at Brandon was one of the ones where the death rate was so high that Ferrier proposed “a new cemetery.”
“In the 1902–1903 school year six pupils died at the school. Drawn from distant communities including Gods Lake, Norway House, and Berens River, the youngest of these children was only seven, the oldest 16; most were in their early teens when they passed away. As Paul Hackett has shown, this pattern of declining health following admission to residential schools would continue throughout the residential school system’s history…. On 29 May 1912, Rev. Thompson Ferrier, Principal of the Brandon Residential School, wrote to the Secretary of the Department of Indian Affairs at Ottawa to propose the establishment of a new cemetery for children who died at the school… In 1915, Ferrier responded to criticism that the boys at the school were poorly dressed by explaining that “In the month of April there is a great deal of work to be done that the boys cannot be very tidy in their clothing in doing.”[1]
Ferrier is cited multiple times in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Report
“In 1903, Brandon, Manitoba, principal T. Ferrier wrote that “while it is very important that the Indian child should be educated, it is of more importance that he should build up a good clean character.”
Such a heavy emphasis was required, in Ferrier’s opinion, to “counteract the evil tendencies of the Indian nature.”
In 1906 – the year before Bryce released his report - Ferrier had a book promoting Residential Schools called “Indian Education in the North West”[2] which was published out of Toronto by the Methodist Church, in which Ferrier calls for the “destruction and end of treaty and reservation life.”
As Superintendent for the Methodist Missions across Western Canada, J. S. Woodsworth’s own father, James Woodsworth, lived in Brandon and was responsible for overseeing Ferrier and the Brandon Residential School.
The Woodsworth and Ferrier families had deeper connections in running Residential Schools for more than one generation.
Among Rev. Thompson Ferrier’s children was Russell T. (Thompson) Ferrier, who became director of education for the department of Indian Affairs.
J. F. Woodsworth was son of Superintendent James Woodsworth, and brother to J.S., the future CCF Leader. J. F. Woodsworth was a Principal at more than one Residential School. He and Russell T. Ferrier are both named as officials who were telling First Nations parents to persuade children to stay in school longer than the act required by law. They also sent police to recover children whose families did not want to send them to school.
There are many official biographies of J.S. Woodsworth online that mention none of this.
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.
Because of conspiracy theory based debates about Residential Schools, we are ignoring the truly horrific current treatment of Indigenous people by child and family services, justice and health care systems run by provincial governments. It is not just “intergenerational trauma” that Indigenous people are experiencing, because the trauma is happening right now.
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.
In December 2008, the Winnipeg Free Press reported that “16 children died in the care of CFS.”
The number of children in the custody of CFS started soaring in 2006-07.
2006 – 6,629 children
2007 – 7,241 children
2008 – 7,837 children
By 2013 had gone over 11,000. 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 were 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.
No jurisdiction in the world was taking more children away from parents than Manitoba. Other provinces have done it as well, though to a lesser degree - and they also took the children’s money.
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 for this practice - but taking children has not stopped. According to the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, more children were apprehended last year than ever.
Provincial child welfare agencies have been called “today’s residential schools,” and in many ways they are worse. Children still die. They are seized at birth instead of at school age. They have been warehoused in hotels and when space ran out in hotels, they put them in jails. That is still happening, right now.
It’s not that values have changed. 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, and it is still happening.
We might well ask how The Wall Street Journal, or the Fraser Institute, and all these great conservative intellectuals would accept the word of a conspiracy theorist. Conrad Black, Jonathan Kay, Barbara Kay, the Fraser institute, Tom Flanagan, professors and retired judges like Brian Giesbrecht, the Frontier Institute.
The answer is that their partisanship and conservative worldview is so ingrained that it is indistinguishable from religion - but the denial they are pushing has a very specific political aim, which is to manufacture doubt in a way that absolves the people who are responsible of blame and place it back on the people who’ve been harmed, in order to deny them justice.
The National Crime is still happening, and it’s still being denied. The WSJ, the Fraser Institute and the rest of hastily-assembled posse of wingnuts and conspiracy theorists need to be called out for their sloppy research and their bad faith in foisting revisionist history on the unsuspecting public.
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Thank you for laying this out clearly and in detail. As Canadians we need to face up to the facts of our history rather than grasp at the opiate of denial.