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 Holocaust, the largest and cruellest genocide in human history, is also the best-documented deliberate mass killing meant to exterminate an entire ethnic group. As much as this gravest form of crimes against humanity has been documented, this has not prevented its constant distortion and self-serving manipulation by politically motivated actors.Less well known is that this misrepresentation, even if unintended, serves to either undermine or cast doubt on the historical truth of what was the genocide of genocides. Holocaust distortion in the context of indigenous issues, particularly in North America, refers to the practice of comparing European colonization and the treatment of indigenous peoples — such as the residential school system — directly to the Holocaust. This comparison is a form of distortion because it trivializes the specific nature of the Holocaust while decontextualizing indigenous history.There is no better recent example of Holocaust distortion and trivialization than the March 25 update to members of the Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Issues by Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation (legally the Kamloops Indian Band), of a shocking announcement she released on May 27, 2021, that was heard around the world: This past weekend, with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of the [buried] remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School … “We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” stated Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir. Shortly following this declaration, one based on a combination of ground penetrating radar images that can’t positively detect human or other organic remains and unproven ‘indigenous knowings’ by unnamed individuals, many indigenous activists, including Casimir herself, and their supporters have called this discovery part of a genocide to exterminate Canada’s Aboriginal people..Despite nearly five years having passed between the original announcement and her Senate committee appearance, Casimir claimed it will take decades to begin searching for purported graves. As revealed by Blacklock’s Reporter, Casimir argued that “Holocaust investigations have continued for more than 75 years. Truth takes time.”“Investigating what happened to the children cannot be completed in a few years or through short-term funding cycles,” she opined, a statement that ignored the $12.1 million the federal government granted the Band to do so. Though superficially correct — indeed, study of the Holocaust is still ongoing 81 years after the Nazi defeat — Casimir’s comparison is totally misplaced.Compared to the Holocaust and other universally recognized genocides like the Armenian and Rwandan genocides, Casimir’s confession that her Band has made no attempt to recover any reputed remains at the site, not even a single body, is particularly troubling.This failure to retrieve any remains explains why Senator Mary Jane McCallum (Manitoba), herself a former Residential School student, stated that the families of the buried children deserved answers. “For me, I want those bodies taken home,” she said.“They died there in violence, they were buried in violence, and we need to take them home and honour them so they can be with their loved ones,” said Senator McCallum. “Remove them from that site.”“We are still working through those steps and those processes and still have much work to do,” replied Casimir, without giving any details about those “steps” and “processes.”.Senator Scott Tannas (Alberta) also questioned why the Band had not exhumed any remains.“I just wondered, coming up on the fifth anniversary of the initial discovery that you were a part of, the 215 graves, how many people have you identified that you believe are within that 215?” asked Senator Tannas. “That is out of my realm right at this time,” replied Chief Casimir.Translation: no named student is known to be buried at the site.“How do we get to the truth and begin to take children home where the families want them to go home?” asked Senator Tannas. “How do we identify that? I am trying to understand.”“That’s the question I am asking,” said Senator Tannas. “How do you get to the spot where you say, ‘Okay, it’s time for us to begin excavating and trying to start bringing people home’?”“How do you see this process working?” asked Senator Tannas.“Well, I definitely see this here, it’s definitely not a one-, three-, or five-year process,” replied Casimir. “I definitely see it as a longer process that is going to take some time.”.Compare the contents of those exchanges with the two Senators to the aftermath of the 1998–1999 Kosovo War, a bitter conflict in which Serbian and Yugoslav forces conducted a systematic campaign of violence, including murders, rapes, and forced displacement against Kosovo Albanians, resulting in over 13,500 deaths.According to posts on X by Lee Humphrey and Jonathan Kay..As for the Holocaust, Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale, which resulted in the deaths of six million Jews. The Nazis also murdered millions of non-Jews, including Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Romani people, and others deemed undesirable, such as people with disabilities.Apart from autopsies and other physical evidence, detailed statistics were calculated using multiple sources. These sources include surviving Nazi Germany reports and records; prewar and postwar demographic studies; records created by Jews during and after the war; documentation created by resistance groups and underground activists; and other available, extant archival sources. During the Holocaust, the Nazis and their allies and collaborators murdered Jews in many places using several methods. The two main ones were poison gas and mass shootings. They also murdered Jews in other acts of violence and by deliberately denying them access to adequate food, shelter, medical care, and other necessities. Statistics list the number of Jewish people killed in killing centres (sometimes called "death camps" or "extermination camps"); in mass shooting operations and associated massacres; as prisoners in camps and ghettos; and outside of sites of detention in other acts of violence.For example, the Nazi Germany regime created five main killing centres specifically to murder Jewish people using poison gas, resulting in the murder of 2.7 million Jews, most of whose names have been discovered by painstaking research..Though there is no single Nazi Germany document that accounts for every death in the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of pages of Nazi Germany documents minutely record this information. One of the best documented aspects of the Holocaust by the perpetrators is transportation to and gassing operations at killing centres. Thus, it is known with considerable specificity and precision the death toll for each of the five central killing centres of the Holocaust, even though these were spread across occupied Europe.Nazi Germany’s extensive paper trail formed the basis of the case against Nazi leaders and organizations at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In other postwar trials, Nazi Germany documents helped prove that individuals had perpetrated specific crimes. Witness testimonies in postwar trials also helped convict perpetrators.Survivors documented their experiences in memoirs, diaries, and written and oral testimonies. In some cases, written testimonies survived, but their authors did not. Survivors spearheaded the creation of archives, memorials, and museums, among them the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.Again, compare this to the totally undocumented “genocidal murder” of Indian Residential School students. A thorough and unbiased physical and archival investigation would reveal that there is not a single, authentic documented case of a student murdered by a staff member at any government-funded Indian Residential School in Canada, including the Kamloops one, during the 113 years these schools operated (1884-1997), reason enough to dismiss Casimir’s empty testimony.Most important of all, drawing on the Holocaust to bolster an argument with no supporting evidence not only serves to trivialize the murder of millions of Jews and other people in universally recognized genocides but also reveals that Casimir and her activist supporters don’t seem to understand the difference between indigenous knowledge based on rumours, legends, and myths and scientific knowledge rooted in either verifiable or falsifiable truths. Comparing the Holocaust to other alleged crimes against humanity, including the unverified claim that Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were genocidal in intent and practice, is an unconscionably pernicious practice.At the end of the day, without truth, there will never be reconciliation with indigenous people.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.
