The 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s multi-volume Final Report documenting the history, operation, and legacy of the Indian Residential Schools (IRSs) contains many tales from its former students told during deliberations held across the country..Given the attention paid to the report’s largely negative generalizations, it's beyond curious the credibility or accuracy of these student stories have rarely been questioned, let alone carefully examined. Orally delivered both publicly in the presence of other testifiers (where later statements could easily have been contaminated by earlier ones) or in camera (where their contents could not be questioned even in the minds of impartial observers), no collaboration or other supporting evidence, including naming those who criminally abused them, was permitted..In short, the elementary rules of Western common-law justice were never followed. Yet these testimonies inform much of the content of the report and its many costly “calls to action.”.There are other signs much was amiss not only with the way these depositions were delivered, but in the way they were interpreted and generalized..No mention has ever been made that the 1998 mandate of the TRC was transformed from a “holistic and comprehensive” attempt to “Acknowledge Residential School experiences, impacts and consequences,” including its “systemic harms.” In the 2015 report, this mandate was arbitrarily converted to “reveal[ing] to Canadians the complex truth about the history and the ongoing legacy of the church-run residential schools, in a manner that fully documents the individual and collective harms perpetuated against Aboriginal peoples.”.Given this unsanctioned transformation, it is not surprising the 7,000 or so testifiers representing less than 5% of the 150,000 students — including those who related no horror stories about their school experience — who attended these mainly church-managed boarding school during their 113 years of government control, 1883-1996, along with all former IRS students, are nearly always called “survivors,” as if they are equivalent to Nazi death camp survivors, a logically fallacious and factually groundless analogy..Thousands of true survivors of genocide, mainly European Jews, were physically persecuted by the Nazis or their collaborators in enclosed ghettos, sealed concentration camps, and forced labor brigades, barely escaping physical execution in the process. Conversely, there is not a single authenticated case of an IRS student who was murdered while attending one of these schools..This libel against the six million Jews systematically murdered by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 also denigrates the sacrifices made by compassionate Christian teachers, religious leaders, and other school personnel who devoted years of service trying to enhance the life chances of their young charges, thousands of whom benefited from their residential school experience to become productive and influential figures in Canadian society and role models for their people..These “complex truths” were never revealed because the Commission was deliberately preoccupied with the alleged harms and little else..This may be why few successful “survivors” chose to give testimony during the TRC’s cross country hearings..Among the summary report’s many shortcomings were: implying, without evidence, most of the children who attended the schools were grievously damaged by the experience; asserting as self-evident the legacy of the residential schools consists of a host of negative post-traumatic consequences transmitted like some genetic disorder from one generation to the next; conflating so-called “survivors” with the more than 70% of aboriginals who never attended these schools, thereby exaggerating the cumulative harm they caused; ignoring the residential school studies done by generations of competent and compassionate anthropologists; arguing “cultural genocide” was fostered by these schools, yet claiming aboriginal cultures are alive and well; refusing to cast a wide net to capture the school experience of a random sample of attendees, despite a $72 million budget, which would have allowed the commission to do so; and, most of all, accepting at face value the stories of a self-selected group of some 7,000 former students — who appeared before the commission without cross-examination, corroboration or substantiation — as representing the overall school experience of its 150,000 students..The report also disingenuously implies unlike all other people on Earth, indigenous Canadians never prevaricate, exaggerate, or accept money for testifying at formal hearings, as occurred under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement which awarded $4.6 billion to tens of thousands of self-proclaimed “survivors.” The report’s reconciliation recommendations asked for billions more.. Tomson HighwayIndigenous artist Tomson Highway credits his time at a residential school as "nine of the happiest years of my life." .This does not deny orphans or children who were abused or neglected in their homes were forced to attend a residential school for social welfare reasons. Nor does it dispute harsh physical and other abuse sometimes took place at some schools during some historical periods, just as it also occurred in boarding and other schools across Canada during the same periods. There is also no disavowal that a handful of staff, mainly non-clerical, were not charged, convicted, and imprisoned for sexually exploiting the children under their protection, a heinous crime to be sure..Sexual abuse like this together with other alleged harms are said to have resulted in a horrific legacy of adversity and pathology among former students and their descendants..This assumption denigrates the outstanding life achievements of many former students like Phil Fontaine (former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations), Leonard Marchand (the first Status Indian to be appointed to a federal cabinet position), Wilton Littlechild (a former member of the Canadian Parliament and Truth and a Commissioner on the Truth Reconciliation Commission of Canada), and Tomson Highway (a highly regarded playwright and novelist), among countless others.. Randy FredRandy Fred .A lesser known but highly accomplished IRS graduate is Randy Fred whose life story was recently documented by a CBC reporter acting more like a stenographer than a journalist..Fred alleges he “was five years old when his parents were told they'd go to jail if he didn't go to residential school.” This is the first clue that the rest of the piece may be brimming with exaggerations and falsehoods..Being physically forced to go to an IRS when no day school was locally available, even after 1920 when education became mandatory, was extremely rare. Compulsory school attendance did not begin until the age of seven, unless the child was an orphan or the product of an abusive or neglectful home. This did not apply to Fred because “his parents dropped him off at the Alberni Indian Residential School on Vancouver Island,” suggesting that he was raised by two parents in a loving home who wanted him to receive a Western education..Upon his arrival at the school, he was placed in a shower and “sprayed … from head to toe with this bug killer,” a normal delousing practice in all schools throughout their existence because most students came contaminated with lice, other parasites, and various skin infections. The children’s often filthy clothing was burned for the same reason..“The thing he remembers most vividly is loneliness,” a common feeling among most residential school children, even those from wealthy families, whose parents voluntarily sent them to elite boarding institutions..Fred, now 72, stayed at the school from 1956 to 1964, enduring what he claimed was “starvation, illness, humiliation,” an unproven assertion. Indeed, many children were sent to the schools to escape hunger, illness, disease, neglect, and abuse at home, as the historical record shows..Regrettably, Fred was indeed subjected to sexual abuse at the hands of “dormitory supervisor Arthur Henry Plint, who was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison, twice, for the decades of sexual abuse he committed against children at residential school.”.Despite these heinous crimes, justice was done in this case as it was done in dozens of others like it..Fred and 30 others later filed a civil case against the United Church of Canada and the federal government which was ultimately responsible for its operation. Fred complained that he "felt pretty ripped off when I was awarded [only] $97,000 for my nine years of abuse" even though most victims of sexual abuse receive no compensation at all..Perhaps the most egregious omission in this piece is the lack of acknowledgment by a credulous CBC reporter his school experience gave Fred the necessary education to become a successful and prosperous book publisher. Surely, this says much good came from his IRS experience..A publisher with Tillicum Library Imprint, a division of Arsenal Pulp Press, Randy Fred, published Celia Haig-Brown's first book, one of the first texts detailing the experiences of residential school survivors. He also wrote the foreword — something he did again for the follow-up, Tsqelmucwílc: The Kamloops Indian Residential School —Resistance and a Reckoning. (Claire Palmer/CBC).Like tens of thousands of other IRS students whose stories were never heard by the TRC or who were never sought out by the CBC, Randy Fred was a thriver, not a “survivor.”.Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba.
