From Katyn to Kamloops

By C.P. Champion

CAPTION: "The Last Jew in Vinnitsa" 

 

THE LOCATION BY radar scanning of the remains of an estimated 215 children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site was another grim image and reminder that much of the experience of native people in Canadian history has been tragic. Learning more about isolated school gravesites, one can only be saddened at the harsh lot endured by children far from home and by all innocent people who suffered and died from disease in epidemics. But it is if possible sadder still to see a grossly distorted and selective narrative taking grip of a large segment of society, one that threatens to empty “truth and reconciliation” of real meaning or effect. 

Mass unmarked graves have evil connotations especially in the 20th century. In the forest of Katyn near Smolensk in April 1943, the German army discovered eight unmarked graves containing 4,443 bodies of Polish officers, each shot in the back of the head. Soviet propaganda blamed the Germans and Moscow did not admit responsibility for the murders until 1989, fifty years after Stalin’s invasion under the Nazi-Soviet friendship treaty of August 1939. Other mass graves have been unearthed in recent times, such as those of 1,200 Jews murdered in German-occupied Belarus, discovered in 2019. Spain’s Social Democrats have dug up some 800 mass graves in the past 20 years, doing their best to associate their centre-right opponents today with the long-defunct Franco regime.

Almost the entire media and social media class in Canada, however, seized on Kamloops as evidence of “Canada’s Holocaust,” as if the children had been deliberately killed or death were the norm rather than the very sad exception. What we are talking about here are "lost cemeteries," not hidden murder victims. As a correction pointed out in The Washington Post, "The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation says the remains were found spread out; it considers it an unmarked, undocumented burial site, not a mass grave."

Yet much of the political elite responded like a Pavlovian dog, and the near-universal assumption is now that such unidentified graves are proof that the government, nuns, or the pope were responsible for “genocide.” Teachers leading classes online implied that the children had been killed; this is now the norm in schools. Those Indian children who did somehow manage not to get wiped out by clergymen and the three R’s are now described as “survivors.” But anyone over the age of 40 knows that the term “survivor” was specifically used for “Holocaust survivor,” meaning European Jews not exterminated in the Shoah, and that the word has since been co-opted by others for its political emotiveness rather than its accuracy.

When The Dorchester Review remarked on Twitter on May 30 that most of the children likely died of disease (meaning they were not murdered), the mere suggestion was met with a huge efflux of ivory tower and Twitter gutter posturing about “denialism” seemingly from millennial activists unaccustomed to discussing things once they have made up their own mind. It is almost as if extremism is the new the mainstream where they are concerned. Certainly there is much about the Indigenous experience in Canada that they do not and cannot understand: for example, why do most Indigenous people embrace Christian religion today? Why is it difficult for people to differentiate remote gravesites at impoverished schools that experienced epidemics from the myriad scenes of mass execution during the Holocaust such as Babi Yar, a ravine where 33,000 Jews were shot by German soldiers and Ukrainian collaborators and dumped in unmarked graves in 1943?

 

LIKE THE totalitarian propagandists of history, activists do not hesitate to use the dead as ammunition to blast Canada as a racist and genocidal country. The momentum of the Sinclair Commission is in fact to keep the wounds always as raw as possible to prevent healing. Thanks to the multi-billion dollar grievance industry that has metastasized since the 1970s there can never be closure, a situation made worse by the Harper government’s failure to set any limit or time cut-off for claimants.

The Sinclair Commission reports are not the last word but rather a beginning where historians are concerned. We must hope brave researchers will emerge to bring a semblance of balance to the story of the schools. They weren’t ideal and were sometimes horrible, but they were a very far cry from concentration camps. It does seem pathetic in hindsight that they were the best method that Victorian do-gooders could devise but they put great faith in Progress. And the character of the schools changed over time. Was the quality of a typical school operating in 1897 really much the same in 1967? How much do we really know about that? As many successful Indigenous, Métis, and Inuit people’s careers in recent times demonstrate, this is one part of the story barely touched on by Sinclair’s work.

It is erroneous to call the schools “compulsory” with “the aim of forcibly assimilating indigenous youth,” as did the BBC, for example. Some were compulsory, others not. Only about one-third of native children in Canada ever attended a residential school, so they cannot all have been compulsory. Some teachers, then as now, were motivated by the desire to prepare youth, amidst the onslaught of industrial society and urbanization, for a decent career and good family life. People without education and skills, then as now, are at a disadvantage. There are former students on record who spoke their own languages freely at school, which casts doubt on the cultural genocide narrative.

Another ignored aspect is this: What was it like to be a teacher or administrator? Are there no diaries, letters, memoirs, or other such records? It is ridiculous to compare organizations of poor Oblates to machine-gun-toting Einsatzgruppen and Soviet NKVD. And it is equally false and unjust to act as if every single nun or priest or brother or Methodist minister and his wife was a child-abuser or sexual predator. Obviously no such person should be entrusted with the care of children (though it still happens today).

 

IT SHOULD BE possible also to acknowledge that the Indigenous renaissance and resurgence that began with the organization of groups such as the League of Indians in 1919, the Indian Association of Alberta in 1939, the National Indian Brotherhood in 1967, and the fruits of that activity such as the Red Paper of 1970 and so on, were possible thanks in part to Residential School education. It would be interesting to know how many of the 600-plus chiefs of the Assembly of First Nations today received such an education and how many were taught alongside non-indigenous people in urban settings, and how the proportions have changed over time. A sense of proportion is one of the things that is missing.

Anthropologist Scott Hamilton’s paper “Where Are the Children Buried?” reveals that such lost gravesites exist not because the teachers treated bodies as “detritus” (as Colby Cosh wrote) but because bodies need to be buried quickly in remote epidemic conditions whether one at a time or in larger numbers. “Some graves may lie unrecognized after the decay and disappearance of wood grave markers and enclosing graveyard fences,” he wrote. The lack of an individual burial for every child, which some have called a “basic human right,” should be less shocking to people who have witnessed families unable to hold funerals in the recent pandemic. Unmarked shared graves were the norm for the poor for centuries as in the Irish Famine and the Spanish Flu. Mass graves were reported in Iran and Brazil last year and in Africa during Ebola outbreaks. Many poor white Canadians were buried in “unmarked pauper’s graves” in the past, though no one likes the idea.

Everyone agrees that as many Residential School children’s remains as possible must be found, the causes of death determined, and their graves again properly honoured. However natural compassion should not be distorted into a Big Lie narrative that “we” committed genocide or that Canadians are complicit in their own version of the Holocaust. The experience of native people is part of a unique story for good and ill. Despite the anguish and heartache that the Sinclair Commission actually perpetuates, no one should be entitled to some unique aristocratic victim status in this country or eventually it will implode. Residential schooling represents neither a genocide, nor a Holocaust, nor mass murder. There is a vast gulf between Kamloops and Katyn, or Babi Yar, and we should not lose sight of that.

C.P. Champion edits The Dorchester Review. www.dorchesterreview.ca 


Older Post Newer Post


  • David on

    Callous is right. There’s also careless with the facts. I quite enjoyed your book too. But this piece fails on both compassion and fact-checking.

    Deaths are sad, you say. But people disagreeing with you about history is “sadder still”? Goodness. That is quite a statement.

    As we know from the contemporary reports of Peter Bryce, for instance, disease was made more prevalent by conditions in the schools. The governments of the day chose to ignore his research.

    Should we minimize mass graves when people in them are not deliberately killed but died over time? If we did, we would also minimize mass graves in, for instance, China.

    Almost the entire media? Your side has not been silenced in the media, not by a long stretch. Various opinions have been presented in the press.

    The term “survivor” is widely used around the world, including by survivors of the Cambodian genocide – which I trust you will not minimize despite the fact than many of those deaths came from (state-engineered) famine. If you will not allow survivors of Asian genocides to use the word, you are entering a very offensive area towards them and their families. I would urge you to reconsider.

    Genocide, as originally defined by Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, who created the word, has multiple meaning, not only mass killings. Google it. There is some very good work done on genocide out there, and on how to prevent it.

    There is no “Sinclair commission.” There was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission with 3 commissioners, with Wilton Littlechild and Marie Wilson and equal commissioners to Sinclair. They were backed by a huge amount of painstaking research by many careful researchers. If you wish to malign their work, ad hominem attacks should be replaced by specifics about there you think their research was in error.

    We must “use the dead” because we must remember in order to prevent future atrocities. Thus the slogan Never Again, or Remember the Rape of Nanking, among others. We owe it to the dead to tell their stories. That’s the logic, for instance, behind the monument to the victims of communism that Canadian taxpayers are funding. Your talk of a “grievance industry” is either highly insensitive to those who remember past genocides and honour the dead, or else you are singling out Canada’s residential schools alone as something that should not be remembered actively.

    Many Indigenous children were compelled to attend residential schools without parental consent. Thus the word “compulsory.” The claim of forced assimilation is drawn from the words of policy makers at the time, such as D.C. Scott. It’s not some BBC invention, it was self-proclaimed government policy – just as assimilation was the policy of British empire officials in India (see for instance Macauley’s famous Minute on Education). I am not sure why you as a historian would call the policy makers of the time liars.

    Teacher testimonies? See the relevant sections of the TRC report. It’s full of useful information. You should read it.

  • Steve Hartwell on

    Thank you for your effort to inject a semblance of common sense reality to this whole T&R campaign. A number of prominent 1st Nations Canadians who enjoyed and benefitted greatly from attending a Residential School have tried to say so and likewise vilified and silenced by the current racist hatred of Canada campaign. It is a fact being ignored today that back when those schools were begun Canada’s 1st Nations were teetering on extinction. The schools were created to save them. Bad aspects included, they succeeded in that goal. Far more good was achieved. If not for those schools Canada’s 1st Nations would not be the thriving dynamic fastest growing ethnic group they are today.

    Though you covered almost all relevant points, both good and bad, I feel two more aspects should be included.

    1/ The ancestors of today’s Canadian 1st Nations were themselves invaders, conquerors, and colonizers of each other, long before and after Europeans arrived. They later played and used the Europeans to do it. Only the Whole Truth will lead to meaningful Reconciliation.

    2/ Now as their global empire rapidly shrinks the United States must quickly establish total ownership and control of Canada’s massive natural resources. I believe this 1st Nations hatred of Canada campaign is actually part of a much larger campaign being perpetrated by Americans, to induce Canadians to tear Canada apart, so the United States can gobble up and annex the pieces.

    Steve Hartwell
    St Catharines, Ontario, CANADA

  • Janice on

    Thank you for this. Our main stream media is awash in rhetoric that appears to be motivated to create controversy and conflict.

    The narrative which is being propagated is extremely damaging for all Canadians, but especially so for those indigenous Canadians who have absorbed it uncritically. There are very serious social problems in indigenous communities that are desperately in need of attention. But, instead of getting attention and working toward solutions, the problems are swept up into the “generational trauma” narrative, as if to say nothing can be done; it will ever be thus.

    Generations ago, good people saw education as a key factor for anyone to be able to participate fully in a new and changing economy. That is one piece of what led to the Indigenous Residential and Day School system. Today is a time when it is possible for thinking people to learn, to really learn, to really do some good, to understand. Instead, good people censor any alternate understanding or experience, even when put forward by an indigenous person.

    What will be said in the future about a people who sought to destroy the possibility of truly understanding; people too intellectually lazy to want to know more, and who now demanding history be re-written in favour of self- flagellation and casting a people into the role of perpetual victim?

    This, what is happening today, is at least as harmful and at least much a tragedy, and perhaps more so because we are willfully ignoring the opportunity to do better.

  • Connie on

    The Dorchester Review is ill-informed and ill-intentioned.

    Residential schools were mandatory from the 1920’s to 1950’s. Traditional Indigenous governments were outlawed and any use of ceremonies, meetings, regalia, etc. were harshly punished. Passes were required to leave the reserves. Indigenous people were forbidden from using our courts to pursue land claims and Aboriginal rights. All government efforts pursued the goal of destroying Indigenous peoples to destroy their land rights.

    Rates of death of children in those schools were higher than anywhere else in the country due to lack of sanitation, overcrowding, poor ventilation (windows sealed, doors locked) intentional failure to separate sick children, poor nutrition, lack of care or caring, malice and abuse.

    The governments of Canada approved of the high death rates, because it helped them achieve their goal, “the final solution of our Indian problem”:
    Duncan Campbell Scott, Superintendent of Indian Affairs 1920, in response to Dr. Peter Bryce’s warnings regarding tuberculosis on reserves and schools:

    “It is readily acknowledged that Indian Children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this department which is geared toward a final solution of our Indian problem.”
    https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/bernie-farber/duncan-campbell-scott-legacy_b_14289206.html

    Meanwhile, thousands more Indigenous children were stolen from their families and communities during the Sixties Scoop, and placed with white families. The excessive ‘apprehensions’ of Indigenous children from their families and communities continues in Canada to this day.

  • Sarah on

    This article was a breath of fresh air.
    I’m so tired of reporting that treats assumptions as facts and has no interest in asking logical questions.
    Keep writing, please.



Leave a comment

Please note, comments must be approved before they are published