Toronto author Robert MacBain, a former consultant to the Department of Indian Affairs, has been involved with the Indigenous file in one way or another for more than 60 yearsAs part of her taxpayer-funded campaign to portray Canadians as genocidal racists, Canada’s Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites misrepresented the case of an Ojibway cemetery in northwestern Ontario.In a report released on July 3, 2024, special interlocutor Kimberly Murray said the cemetery at the former Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario, is an example of how Indigenous students “were mistreated, disrespected, and dehumanized after their deaths.”Let’s take a closer look.First, the cemetery her report is focused on was used mainly for adult Christian Ojibways and, even at that, there were only about 35 graves.Second, there were only 15 student deaths during the 47 years that the school, which accommodated 150 students each year, operated on the outskirts of Kenora.The cemetery Ms. Murray’s report refers to was built on the school property in the early 1950s to accommodate adult Ojibway Christians.The majority of the parents of the children at Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School were practising Christians. Many of them wrote “God bless you” at the end of their letters to the school principal. Parents said they prayed for the staff and their children and asked Principal Stephen T. Robinson to remember them in his prayers. “May God bless you. A happy merry Christmas to you. Happy new year,” one parent wrote. “We always pray for you,” wrote another.And then there’s the parent who wrote: “I hope that they [children] pray on Christmas. I guess I will want them to come home in summer because it’s too far from here to send them home for Christmas.”There was a photo of the cemetery in the June 19, 1958, issue of the Kenora Daily Miner and News with a caption that read:“The Ojibway Presbyterian Cemetery situated at the eastern outskirts of Kenora, adjacent to Round Lake; a beautiful peaceful spot [emphasis added], is a last resting place for Ojibway Indians of this area. White posts and wire fencing enclose the green grass carpeted area, while rows of white crosses with their hand painted names are the work of Alfred Redsky and Mervyn Ogemah, pupils of Cecilia Jeffrey Indian School, while Mr. D. C. Junkin in the staff at the school is the man responsible for the building and maintaining of the cemetery.”While the newspaper article is cited in the report’s endnotes, there is no reference to the cemetery having been described as “a beautiful peaceful, spot.”Ms. Murray’s report also quotes from a letter the school’s principal wrote in November, 1954, in which he said:“We have a new cemetery beside the railway track with a white fence around it. We exhumed the five graves that were on the road allowance and re-interred the corpses in the new plot. When this was all done we held a consecration service at the cemetery on Sunday October 31st.”Her report also quotes from a letter a nurse at the school wrote in July, 1953, in which she said: “Mr. Hill has made five nice white crosses for the graves and they look good.”Despite this evidence in her own report, Ms. Murray says: “When viewed as potentially dangerous and as a threat to individuals, to the Canadian nation, and to civilization itself, the lives and deaths of Indigenous people and their consequent burials became ungrievable.”Ms. Murray’s report mistakenly blames the overgrown state the cemetery is in today on a “lack of government planning for the care and upkeep of cemeteries.”Not so.The school site, including the cemetery at the opposite end of Round Lake, was turned over to the Grand Council of Treaty #3 after the school closed in 1976.Despite the fact the cemetery is directly across the road from the headquarters of Treaty #3 police, the graves are completely overgrown.When the local township council complained about the dilapidated state of the cemetery in July, 1990, the Ojibway Cultural Centre issued a news release saying that “the burials are left in a state of nature consistent with traditional Ojibway beliefs.”The release said concerns that had been expressed about graves having sunk into the earth and crosses in danger of falling down were “misplaced”.“Town council is advised to direct its concern to lands under its control,” the release said, “and not to further reveal its disrespect for a traditional Ojibway cemetery.”That statement brings to mind the unkempt state of many Indigenous cemeteries across Canada — including the one in Kamloops, B.C. where it has been reported internationally that 200 Indigenous children lie in unmarked graves.Ms. Murray was dead wrong on the issue about the Ojibway cemetery at Kenora.She was also wrong when she wrote in her report that: “It is a social phenomenon of settler colonialism that rendered Indigenous children in the care of the state and churches invisible, voiceless, and disposable. From this perspective, indigenous children’s deaths were seen as a ‘lamentable’ necessity to facilitate the White European settlement of Canada.”There is no evidence to substantiate this defamatory claim.What else did Kimberly Murray get wrong?And why did the Trudeau government provide her with a budget of $10 million to sully Canada’s good name in the international court of public opinion?Toronto author Robert MacBain, a former consultant to the Department of Indian Affairs, has been involved with the Indigenous file in one way or another for more than 60 years. His website is: www.RobertMacBainBooks.ca
