Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew doesn’t agree that “residential school denialism” should be criminalized. Instead, he advocates for more education to combat misinformation.He’s right.So why is he standing in a former Brandon Residential School cemetery, misinforming the public by implying that some crime has been committed there? No crime was committed. Just the sad deaths of a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of indigenous people who died of diseases more than 100 years ago. Here are the facts. Most of the deaths at the Brandon Indian Residential School (BIRS) occurred when school attendance was completely voluntary. Indian parents could choose to send their children to a residential school, to a day school, or to no school at all. During those early years, most Indian children who lived in remote areas did not attend school at all, and if they did, they attended only sporadically.That was the problem. Northern Indian children were growing up semi-literate at best. For most, their lives were difficult and short. A group of Methodists wanted to change that. According to the Manitoba Historical Society, these men travelled to northern Manitoba to find out why the few day schools there were failing. What they discovered was not one but many reasons why school attendance was so poor. In one instance, they found that the parents were afraid to have their children travel across a dangerous bay to a school, fearing that the canoes would tip and their children drown. There were many other practical reasons preventing children from attending.But mostly the reasons were cultural. Sitting in a school was completely alien to these people. The children learned by watching their parents and siblings, as they had done for thousands of years. This was deeply ingrained in the culture. Books were not. The parents were mostly illiterate, and there were no books in the homes. For that matter, how does one even send a child to school if you are out on a trapline for weeks or months at a time?.The Methodists came up with the idea of a boarding school. Some of the local chiefs lobbied hard for residential schools to be built in their own communities — the chief at Berens River, for example. But building and operating these schools was very expensive, especially for what was then a poor country that had almost bankrupted itself building the Canadian Pacific Railway. So, for better or worse, the decision was made to build one residential school many miles south in Brandon. Parents who were willing to make the sacrifice of parting with their children for the entire school year could send their children there. The decision belonged to the parents.It was a hard sell. At first, almost no parent chose to do so.The first principal, Reverend John Semmens, canoed far up treacherous Lake Winnipeg in 1895, trying to interest hesitant parents. It took a few years before some parents agreed to send their children, and the picture at the top of this article shows the second principal and teachers transporting children from Berens River to the school. Word of mouth spread, and soon there were too many applications for the limited spaces at the school. The Manitoba Historical Society records tell this story in greater detail for interested readers.So BIRS filled its classrooms and operated successfully for many years. We now know that many students had bad experiences at the school, but during the many years of operation of the school, most of the reports from parents, students, and staff were largely positive.The death of a child from disease then was not uncommon. But for Indians, it was far worse. When the school opened in the late nineteenth century, mortality rates for infants and children on Manitoba reserves were devastatingly high. [1, 2]Canada’s Chief Medical Officer for the Department of Indian Affairs, Dr. Peter Bryce, documented this. His research from 1904 to 1906 concluded that the TB death rate for Indians was nearly 20 to 40 times higher than for the general population.The prairie reserves had some of the highest tuberculosis death rates on the planet. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].And most of the children arrived at the residential schools from these reserves already infected with tuberculosis. In a study Dr. Bryce conducted, every Indian child arriving at a residential school from the eight reserves was already infected with tuberculosis. In his words: “In no instance was a child awaiting admitting to a residential school found free of tuberculosis.”Inevitably, in some cases, the disease progressed, and children died, just as so many more Indian children were dying of disease on their home reserves.But here’s the thing. The parents of these children knew that death was always waiting around the corner. They were perfectly aware that their children could die, whether they went away to school or stayed at home. This was just a sad fact of life at the time. And disease conditions at BIRS certainly were bad in an age when tuberculosis was not well understood, and the antibiotics that could treat it had not yet been discovered. But at least there was medical treatment available at the school, and hygienic conditions were far better than those in the crowded, unhygienic shacks the northern Indians lived in. Tuberculosis was bad at residential schools, but much worse on the reserves. Children at residential schools were far healthier than the majority of the children who stayed behind on the reserves.Those are the facts. So, if Premier Kinew is serious about better educating the public and preventing misinformation, why is he implying that death was something that only happened at residential schools and not on the reserves the children came from? And why is he implying that if only the parents had kept their children at home, they would have been just fine?That’s not true..The truth is that death happened everywhere, particularly among Indians. Those deaths that did occur at residential schools were an infinitesimally small fraction of the tens of thousands of Indians who died of diseases such as influenza, smallpox, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, and many others. Isn’t the failure to put the residential school deaths in context and compare the 3,200 residential school deaths to what might actually be as many as 100,000 Indian deaths on reserves in itself a kind of “denialism?” Aren’t Premier Kinew — and people like Leah Gazan — being “denialists” by focussing only on deaths at residential schools and ignoring those other 100,000 deaths? And aren’t they claiming that the massive problems on Indian reserves come from the residential schools — schools that only 150,000 of the millions of indigenous people who have lived their lives in Canada since 1883 even attended?Canadians have been through five years of gaslighting by politicians and others since we first heard the false claim of 215 slain children secretly buried at Kamloops “with the forced help of six-year-olds.” This was immediately followed by more false claims of “15-25,000, maybe even more” such sinister deaths and burials. We have endured the silliness of an unserious prime minister kneeling in an ordinary cemetery with a teddy bear, pretending it had something to do with secret residential school deaths. (It didn’t.) He also lowered the flags for six months for “missing children” (that didn’t exist). And we have had his Indian Affairs Minister, Marc Miller, publicly pretend that 215 bodies had been found when he knew that only ambiguous “soil disturbances” had been detected. He then promised poor indigenous communities $320,000,000 if they made similar bogus claims. (Of course, they took the money.)Isn’t it time that we expected more from our elected representatives than this gaslighting?Premier Kinew, certain children who attended the BIRS succumbed to illness. In many instances, comparable mortality rates were observed among children who did not attend such institutions. These fatalities were not classified as criminal acts; rather, they reflected the unfortunate realities of that historical period.And consider that you are in a unique position. Instead of just continuing to scapegoat residential schools, you could take the lead in eliminating that shocking gap that exists between indigenous people and other Canadians. I think you know that status Indian men in Alberta now have a life expectancy 19 years shorter than that of the average Canadian.Other Canadian politicians are terrified of the accusation of being “denialists” or enemies of “reconciliation,” but as an indigenous premier, you can speak candidly, as you once did as the young commentator I listened to on CBC. Please stop doing the easy stuff, like mindless virtue signalling about residential schools, and get to the real problems.
