The indigenous genocide blood libel — that countless children were murdered at Indian Residential Schools (IRS) — did not begin with stories by aboriginal knowledge keepers, as most people assume..Although many indigenous actors have been involved in this tangled web of deceit, what was originally a blood libel against Jewish people was re-jigged by a white man, a defrocked United Church of Canada minister. And its strongest promotion since then has been at the hands of an NDP member of the House of Commons who, although having one indigenous grandparent, is actually the daughter of a Jewish Holocaust survivor..Thus the IRS genocide claim now repeated by many indigenous leaders, elders, knowledge keepers and ordinary folk, legions of non-indigenous people including Justin Trudeau, Pope Francis, elected members of the House of Commons and ordinary citizens was not invented in 2021, following the discovery of soil disturbance on the Kamloops Indian Reserve in British Columbia. Rather, it was invented many years earlier by a white man named Kevin Annett. He is a crackpot enemy of the truth if there ever was one, and has been selling snake oil by the bucketful to gullible indigenous and non-indigenous people alike, for more than 30 years..This excommunicated minister was exposed as a wild conspiracy theorist by the National Post’s Terry Glavin in a 2008 The Tyee investigative journalism article that continues to resonate to this day. .According to Glavin and others he quotes, Annett has been peddling the following outrageous lies for years: One of Canada’s most respected First Nations’ leaders trafficked in children from northern British Columbia in a profitable pedophilia ring run out of the West Hastings Street premises of the swish Vancouver Club. His clients are Vancouver judges, politicians, and church leaders; back in the 1930s, a team of German doctors arrived at the Kuper Island Indian residential school and began conducting strange medical experiments on the children. Employing large hypodermic needles, they injected some sort of toxin directly into the chests of the school’s young inmates, and several were killed as a result; in the 1950s and 1960s, aboriginal children at a Vancouver Island medical research facility were tortured with electrodes implanted in their skulls. At least one child was beaten to death with a whip fitted with razors; at the Hobbema and Saddle Lake Indian residential schools in Alberta, children were incinerated in furnaces; at St. Anne’s Indian residential school in Fort Albany, Ontario, children were executed in an electric chair; at McGill University in Montreal, there is a mass grave containing the bodies of aboriginal children killed in experiments undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency’s top-secret MK-ULTRA program..The list of alleged atrocities is nearly endless. The problem is, as and others have shown, Annett failed to produce a shred of supporting evidence. “RCMP investigators who looked into Annett’s allegations always come up empty.”.Annett’s wild conspiracy theories, still repeated by indigenous activists, will likely lead to attempts to criminalize the factual truth-telling about Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. This began in earnest in October 2022 when the above-mentioned NDP MP Leah Gazan got the House of Commons to unanimously recognize genocide occurred at residential schools..The Canadian flag was lowered on the Peace Tower in Ottawa for five long months to commemorate the May 2021 discovery of soil disturbances near the Indian Residential School on the Kamloops indigenous reserves. Human remains have yet to be found there..Not content with getting that spurious motion passed, Gazan took it a step further in February this year, proposing legislation to criminalize attempts to deny that genocide took place at these residential schools. Again, there is no evidence that a single IRS child was ever murdered by a staff member during a 113-year period that saw the enrolment of some 150,000 students in federal government-funded institutions between 1883 and 1996..Not one murder. Some genocide..For Gazan, who represents the riding of Winnipeg Centre, pointing out such inconvenient truths is "Denying genocide [the core issue underpinning residential school denialism] is a form of hate speech …. That kind of speech is violent and re-traumatizes those who attended residential school.".Seemingly always eager to label Canada a genocidal nation, the Office of Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller quickly said he would be interested in reviewing the proposed legislation.."Residential school denialism attempts to hide the horrors that took place in these institutions," Miller's office told CBC News.."It seeks to deny survivors and their families the truth, and distorts Canadians' understanding of our shared history.".The latest episode in this saga occurred on Friday, June 16, when special interlocutor on the missing children, unmarked graves, and burial sites, Kimberly Murray, a women surely familiar with Kevin Annett’s mad assertions, released her interim report on June 16 arguing “urgent consideration” should be given to legal mechanisms to combat residential school denialism..Like Kevin Annett, she wears her biases as a badge of honour. This should not be surprising given her background as the power behind the throne at the TRC; from 2010 to 2015, Murray was the executive director of the Commission “where she worked to ensure survivors of Canada’s residential school system were heard and remembered.”.Unsurprisingly, her “opening words” to the report state, “my role is to give voice to the children. It is not to be neutral or objective — it is to be a fierce and fearless advocate to ensure that the bodies and spirits of the missing children are treated with the care, respect, and dignity that they deserve” even if that “conflicts with my responsibility to function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent way.”.This attack on the fundamental precepts of objective search for truth based on reason, logic, and scientific evidence — rooted in the paradigm clash between Western and indigenous ways of knowing — gave her leave to label denialism as an “attack” whenever there were announcements of the discovery of possible unmarked graves..“This violence [sic] is prolific,” the report said. “And takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations.”.She offered several examples of this “violence,” including one that followed the May 2021 announcement by the Kamloops Indian Band (Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation) that ground-penetrating radar had discovered what are believed by many to be 215 unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School..The Kamloops findings — growing more inconclusive with each passing day — garnered international media attention and triggered an outpouring of grief, shock and anger from across the country..Murray said in her report that on top of dealing with an onslaught of media attention, the Kamloops Indian Band in British Columbia had to deal with individuals entering the site itself..“Some came in the middle of the night, carrying shovels; they said they wanted to ‘see for themselves’ if children are buried there. Denialists also attacked the community on social media.”.This assertion was made with no independent evidence or proof the shovel bearers were not themselves concerned Kamloops band members at a site that was enclosed by a chain-link fence soon after the discovery was made, prompting Terry to argue:.“There was no report of this to the RCMP. We are not invited to know when this happened or to whom these interlopers explained their wicked intentions or who they might have been, exactly. We are simply expected to believe it in the same way Murray’s report asks us to believe the Tk’emlups’ community initially intended to simply fence off the old apple orchard where a ground-penetrating radar survey detected anomalies that were presumed to be graves, so that certain former residential school students, “the ones that buried the children” in the first place, could come and pay their respects..“What? There are people still alive who were among the students in those lurid stories about children being woken up in the middle of the night to bury their classmates? Who are these people? Can we speak to them? Have they spoken to the police?”.Moral certainty based on indigenous ways of knowing, not evidence based on Western science, allowed Murray to state Canada has a role to play in combatting this denialism by giving “urgent consideration” to what legal tools exist to address the problem, including both civil and criminal sanctions..“They have the evidence. The photos of burials. The records that prove that kids died. It is on their shoulders,” Murray told a crowd gathered Friday in Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan..But there is no photographic evidence of IRS children buried beside the shuttered Kamloops IRS nor at any other former IRS school in Canada..The only photographic evidence available are of regular church burials and of thousands of happy school children. As for the records, they prove children who died and were buried at the schools (a minority of all children) or those who died and were buried on their home reserves (the vast majority) received a proper Christian burial after succumbing to a contagious disease like tuberculosis over which indigenous people have little natural immunity..Regardless of this, “The government of Canada and the churches must step up,” Murray said..Justice Minister David Lametti, who appointed Murray to her role and joined the event in Cowessess First Nation via video conference, bending a knee like other Liberal apparatchiks to every indigenous whim and fancy regardless of how illogical or groundless they may be, said that he's open to all possibilities to fighting residential-school denialism, including “a legal solution and outlawing it.” He added Canada can look to other countries that have criminalized Holocaust denial..Looking to other countries is necessary because Holocaust denial is not illegal in Canada unless it can be shown to deliberately foment anti-Semitism. But this Liberal government has little respect for legal niceties, especially when it comes to indigenous demands, so it is likely that IRS denialism will be made a crime regardless of its motives or effects while allowing anyone to freely claim the Holocaust is a myth unless it “willfully promotes antisemitism.”.Kevin Annett’s phony blood libel assertions hang over all these happenings..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba.
