“… by truth, we mean not only the truth revealed in government and church residential school documents, but also the truth of lived experiences as told to us by survivors and others in their statements to this commission. Together, these public testimonies constitute a new oral history record, one based on indigenous … witnessing” (Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015)..With the release of this Summary Final Report in December 2015, indigenous oral history has become unquestionably accepted as revealing absolute truths about the Indian Residential School experience..More particularly, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) accepted the stories of a non-random, self-selected group of some 6,500 former students who appeared before the commission without cross-examination, corroboration, or substantiation as representing the total Indian Residential School experience of its 150,000 students. Equally troubling was the deliberate abjuring of the evidentiary rules that indigenous peoples had lived under for over 400 years when testifying to observing or being victimized by serious crimes..Blind acceptance of oral history also underpinned the May 27, 2021 Kamloops Indian Band press release heard around the world: it announced “the stark truth” of the buried remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School rooted in “a knowing in our community that we were able to verify.”.If there is any questioning of indigenous oral history, forms of witnessing, or the content of “knowings” that involve accusations of brutality against aboriginal people, this has become “genocide denial.”.The latest example of the vilification of those who dare challenge the indigenous genocide narrative comes from Niigaan Sinclair, Associate Professor of Native Studies at the University of Manitoba, and son of Murray Sinclair, former Chair of the TRC. In an angry, ad hominem diatribe in his May 31 Winnipeg Free Press column, “Pushing through residential school denial no easy task,” he claimed that highly published public intellectuals and journalists like Tom Flanagan, Jacques Rouillard, Terry Glavin, and Frances Widdowson suffer from the previously unheard of pathology called “denial addiction.” . Sinclair .Sinclair’s “denial addiction” charge focuses on Tom Flanagan’s assertion that the Kamloops announcement and similar ones now totaling some 2,000 burials in 15 sites, nearly all based on the error-prone technique called ground penetrating radar, “… is the biggest fake news story in Canadian history.”.Sinclair also takes issue with Terry Glavin’s claim that the so-called unmarked graves at residential schools were “sites of speculation,” “unverified,” and “in none of these places were any human remains unearthed,” even though these assertions are supported by a growing body of empirical evidence..To counter these claims, Sinclair argues that:.“The problem is addiction accompanies ignorance, minimizing the problem, and blaming others. Change usually only happens when addicts reach rock bottom.” For him, “… rock bottom for Canada comes in the form of old, irrelevant, out-of-touch and harmful academics, historians and columnists…. Luckily, the spokespeople of Canada’s addiction are now retiring, being fired or shown as irrelevant to the conversation Canada needs to have to determine its future.”.Meanwhile, age is a virtue for Professor Sinclair when applied to the unverified and unimpeached testimonies of aged former Indian Residential Schools students about unreported, undocumented, unsupported, and uninvestigated events that happened 50-60 years ago..This is no indictment of oral history per se, an ancient field of study and method of gathering, interpreting, and preserving the past experiences, voices, and memories of people and communities. At its best, it involves interviewing and confirming (by employing other informants and corroborating writings) the testimonies of eye-witness participants directly involved in past events..But since the 1970s there has been a shift from collecting factual data from knowledgeable informants to interpreting their subjective experiences and historical imagination, often using contemporary beliefs and values..This transformation has been compounded by the numerous limitations of employing historical remembrance: memory loss; the fallibility and unreliability of memory; the bias of interviewers; the inability to verify historical recollections; the unrepresentativeness of the informant sample; the bias of informants; and the impossibility of “pure recall.”.These limitations have long been known but routinely dismissed or ignored by new age oral historians untrained in field research methods..Not long ago, much of the content of the oral history of preliterate peoples was called mythology and folklore. Today, it is referred to as absolute truth by its uncritical supporters. Applied to Canada’s indigenous peoples, it assumes that aboriginal “elders” and “knowledge keepers” never forget, exaggerate, distort, or prevaricate. If true, this would make them unique among all world nations, past and present..Not long ago, also, it was recognized that the content of oral communication constantly changed, sometimes dramatically, as it was passed down from generation to generation to comply with evolving local lifeways and their associated beliefs and values. Today, Indigenous stories are seen as unchanged since time immemorial..This post-modern turn allows Sinclair to vilify this gang of four for the intellectual sin of being so “out-of-touch” as to be committed to the objective search for truth using enlightenment-based rational contemplation and evidence verification..Sinclair’s implicit rejection of traditional Western ways of knowing and their replacement by indigenous oral history allows him to brush aside any need to conduct a rigorous, evidence-based study of the “unmarked graves”:.“The truth is: the full story regarding unmarked graves of residential school children may never be known. What happened is obvious [sic] …. If anyone does need more, though, there are the testimonies of residential school survivors, many of whom identify deaths by disease, shoddy living conditions, and, yes, murder, did in fact happen”..Yet he refrains from plainly addressing why this story may never be known, namely because it is unlikely that any “missing” Indian Residential School children are buried in these “unmarked graves.” The three excavations already undertaken -- the Shubenacadie IRS in Nova Scotia, the Battleford Industrial School in Saskatchewan, and the Camsell Hospital site in Alberta -- have either produced negative results, confirmed that the IRS students’ bodies found were correctly identified and properly buried, or predated the existence of the Indian Residential Schools. Nor is there a single verified case of deaths by “shoddy living conditions,” let alone murder, occurring at any residential school during their 114-year history..Not content to confine denial addiction, including genocide denial, to these four learned commentators and others like them, Sinclair opines that these afflictions are deeply engrained in our Canadian psyche:.“Canada is addicted to telling itself residential schools weren’t that bad, that there are redeeming parts to stealing and trying to assimilate children, that genocide didn’t happen.”.Assuming for the sake of argument that there is something called “denial addiction” and that it afflicts most Canadians, its key symptom is surely a compulsion among its sufferers to challenge established wisdom and myth using elementary logic and solid evidence. Sadly, this traditional skeptical zeal is being transformed into a near psychiatric disorder in our age of identity politics, victimization studies, and the supremacy of feelings and emotion over facts and reason..Guest columnist Hymie Rubenstein is the editor of The REAL Indian Residential Schools Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba
