Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.The leaders of a powerful push against what they call Indian Residential School “denialism” have seen their anti-denialism critique published by the Calgary Herald.The authors of Don’t let denialism distract from truth and reconciliation progress, Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair, are University of Manitoba political activists posing as scholars.Their screed has no relation to the truth and adds nothing to reconciliation.Indeed, it begins with the laughable assertion that “Millions of Canadians participated in Orange Shirt Day activities last week to observe the 6th National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on Sept. 30.”Their source for this claim? A non-existent Ipsos and Leger poll that allegedly “reported” that more than half the country joined truth and reconciliation events.So, how many are “millions who participated”? Apparently, at least 20,899,203, half of Statistics Canada’s July 1, 2026, estimate of the total Canadian population.These two critics also describe a series of what they call recent “stunts aimed at derailing Canada’s truth and reconciliation progress with the promotion of residential school denialism, or the wilful downplaying and minimizing of the harms of the residential schooling system.”One of these was a peaceful September 27 display on public property near the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which they called “part of the far-right’s hyper-fixation on delegitimizing Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc’s ongoing investigation into the school.” On the nearby Pacific Way overpass above the Trans-Canada Highway, the group displayed a banner that read “Got Bones?” to suggest there is no evidence of student death..These protesters were not questioning the carefully recorded fact that 51 student deaths took place at the long-shuttered Kamloops Indian Residential School during its 79 years of operation, 1890-1969. Instead, they were questioning the announcement on May 27, 2021, of the discovery of the buried remains of 215 unnamed children near the school, an announcement whose claims have not been proven nearly six years later..Questioning the refusal of the Kamloops Band to prove its inflammatory accusations, based on associated claims of genocide against missing children whom no parents have reported missing or frantically searched for, is not “denialism.” It is a simple, direct request for truth-telling about an assertion that has rocked this nation since it was first made.Carleton and Sinclair go on to claim that “This kind of denialist rhetoric distracts attention away from the more than 4,000 confirmed deaths at residential schools across the country,” implying that such deaths are somehow morally or criminally problematic rather than reflecting the historical reality that thousands of Canadians of all races and ethnicities died from contagious diseases such as tuberculosis before effective cures and preventative vaccines existed.They also claim that public protesters and others called deniers are “… undermining public confidence in the truth about residential schools and eroding support for reconciliation,” an assertion that conflicts with the elementary fact that without truth, there can never be genuine reconciliation with indigenous people.Equally important, they argue that “the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission], the church and state, and academic experts all agree[d] that it was genocide based on the abundantly clear, publicly available evidence.”Such agreement did not occur, at least not for the TRC. Instead, it used the controversial but clearly extra-legal concept called “cultural genocide” to describe the IRS experience. .As Conrad Black has recently opined:“Words have meaning, and they matter. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission opened its 2015 report with the proclamation that Canada had participated in “cultural genocide,” it was not providing a comprehensive assessment of Canada’s residential school policy; it was leading the witness before the testimony had begun. The suffix “-cide” is not a decorative appendage that is open for subjective interpretation. Suicide, homicide, fratricide, infanticide, regicide: every use of it means the taking of life. Genocide is its most extreme form. As defined by the United Nations in 1948, it means the attempted extermination of an entire nationality, ethnicity, race, or religious group. The UN convention does not mention culture. Bolting “cultural” onto “genocide” does not somehow redefine the term. It tells a lie.”“What is not a lie is that what occurred in the schools was attempted assimilation, a practice in which people from one culture internalize another culture's knowledge and beliefs. But such assimilation is not a crime except perhaps when it involves unwanted brute force. Instead, parents gladly and freely accepted attendance because they were obliged to sign application forms permitting their children’s acceptance so that they could ‘learn the white man’s ways.’”.Most disconcertingly, Carleton and Sinclair also attack the Liberal Party’s refusal to support an initiative led by Winnipeg Centre MP Leah Gazan, a member of the NDP, to criminalize residential school denialism even though the party supported a similar attempt to make Holocaust denial a crime under subsection 319(2.1) of the Canadian Criminal Code back in 2022. Equating the Indian Residential School system, a largely voluntary educational effort where only children from broken, abusive, or severely neglectful homes were obliged to attend and which saw not a single verified murder of a student by a staff member during its 113 years of operation, with the organized murder of some six million Jews and millions of other “undesirable” people so denigrates the latter that it could easily be termed Holocaust denial.Carleton and Sinclair end their piece by saying:“Despite the road to reconciliation in Canada feeling like it’s always one step forward, two steps back … we are slowly making progress on truth and reconciliation.”“We cannot let denialism distract or discourage us from doing the important work of putting truth before reconciliation and continuing to build more respectful relations for the future.”Regrettably, these two “scholars” fail to recognize that reconciliation can never happen without verified truth.Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
