RUBENSTEIN: The truth about Canada’s residential school abuses

Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is the editor of REAL Indigenous Report.Finally, the 2003 Final Report of British Columbia’s RCMP Native Indian Residential School Task Force, also called Project E-NIRS, was released on August 26 thanks to an access to information request by the Investigative Journalism Foundation.The task force was created in 1995 to investigate sexual and other abuse in the province’s Indian Residential Schools after the Alberni RCMP met on November 3, 1994, with unnamed representatives of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council who claimed that 100 of its people had reported alleged abuse during their time at BC’s Indian residential schools.Overwhelmed by the possibility of investigating 100 cases of alleged abuse, the Alberni RCMP sought additional help. The outcome was the establishment of a special, province-wide task force whose sole mandate was to investigate every allegation of physical and sexual abuse alleged to have occurred at the 15 indigenous residential schools in BC. .EDITORIAL: The 'Wild West' had more justice than Liberal Canada.Why the RCMP took the giant and unprecedented leap from 100 unverified accusations brought to their attention by a tribal council to a complex province-wide investigation of all Indian residential schools is unclear. In fact, according to the report, few of the 100 individuals who claimed abuse followed through with formal complaints to the police.Despite the RCMP’s hope that the work of Project E-NIRS would be well received, it was greeted with anxiety and mistrust from the very people it sought to assist. Among other concerns, the aboriginal community expressed alarm at the potential trauma of the investigation, alleging that high suicide and substance abuse rates had followed previous investigations. To address this issue, a special “trauma-informed” protocol was developed to ensure the investigations were completely confidential and “victim-driven.” Moreover, the unprecedented decision was made that the RCMP would refer all formal complaints — regardless of their merits — to Crown Counsel for a charge approval decision if the complainant requested that charges be laid..The task force’s investigation stretched over eight long years, twice the original estimated time. During this period, more than 4,000 tips, including complaints against 129 people and 974 separate allegations of criminal misconduct, were collected.Despite this massive number of tips and allegations, however, the Crown found evidence sufficient to lay criminal charges against a mere 14 individuals, some of whom, including Arthur Plint, a dormitory supervisor at the Alberni Indian Residential School, had been charged before the creation of the task force. In the end, former IRS students were disappointed by the relatively low number of convictions. This disappointment may be why indigenous leaders and activists accepted a less confrontational but more rewarding path to reconciliation. .EDITORIAL: Firing of Alberta coach for his views is an attack on free speech .This different path revealed that potential victim trauma was grossly exaggerated, given the eagerness of former students to testify at the Individual Assessment Process (IAP) extra-judicial civil hearings established by the 2006 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. From September 19, 2007, to March 31, 2019, over 31,000 former IRS students received $3.2 billion for making unproven and unimpeached abuse claims. The average windfall payout was $111,265.As for Project E-NIRS, most of the many complaints of physical assault were quickly dismissed because they were considered legitimate acts of acceptable discipline commensurate with the social standards of the day.The 14 sexual abuse cases also need to be placed in their historical and statistical contexts. Between the early 1930s and the mid-1980s, the period covered by the report, thousands of students attended BC’s 15 IRSs. The limited number of actionable cases indicates that these institutions were not plagued by rampant sexual abuse, as many indigenous people and their supporters are still asserting 22 years later..Neither was a sexual abuse plague found in residential schools in other parts of the country. In the 139 federal government-funded residential schools attended by some 150,000 indigenous children from 1883 to 1997, including the BC cases, “fewer than 50 people have ever been convicted for a sex crime committed at an Indian Residential School.” As heinous as these crimes were, this number is not out of line with sexual abuse accusations and charges laid against the staff of elite British boarding schools.According to Dawn Roberts, Director of Communications for the BC RCMP, Project E-NIRS was not made public when it was completed in 2003 because there were still prosecutions outstanding. However, this would not have precluded the publication of a carefully redacted version of the report.Instead of being released in a timely fashion, the report languished for more than two decades in the RCMP’s E-Division, and during that time, hundreds of boxes of evidence compiled in the course of the investigation were the subject of disclosure requests by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and parties who had commenced civil abuse lawsuits against the federal government and the churches..ROBSON: Edmonton’s gang plan needs teeth, not talk.Why the RCMP would release confidential criminal police reports as evidence in civil suits lodged by former IRS students is incomprehensible, as is the RCMP’s release of records to the TRC, which was legally precluded from making criminal allegations in its deliberations or publications.More important still, it is not unreasonable to conclude that if the RCMP had not withheld this report for 22 years, Canada would have avoided widespread claims by Indian Bands across the country regarding missing and murdered children allegedly buried in unmarked graves. This would have saved the country billions in blood money reparations to assuage guilt for acts the report clearly says never occurred.One category of complaints investigated by Project E-NIRS involved allegations of unlawful death. These ranged from outright allegations of murder to deaths caused by negligence, and even included allegations that babies were being killed and buried on school grounds. Each allegation was thoroughly investigated by the task force and other police units. None of the allegations could be substantiated. In many cases, the investigation established that the death was due to disease or some other natural cause. Indeed, in some cases, the alleged victim was found to be alive several years after his supposed death..One of the more sensational allegations was made by defrocked United Church Minister Kevin Annett, who claimed the Reverend Caldwell, principal of the Alberni Indian Residential School, kicked 14-year-old Maisie Shaw down a set of stairs, resulting in her death and its subsequent cover-up. An extensive investigation ultimately proved that the alleged victim died in the Port Alberni hospital from “acute rheumatic pericarditis” following an eight-day hospitalization, a heart ailment that ran in her family.Another allegation, also reported by chronic conspiracy theorist Annett, was the case of 14-year-old Albert Gray, who was beaten to death for stealing a prune at the Ahousat Indian Residential School in 1939 or 1940. Investigators were unable to find any record of this individual despite an exhaustive search. Nevertheless, interviews with surviving family members confirmed that he died sometime around 1940, several months after leaving the residential school, and that the cause of death was either pneumonia or tuberculosis. Further allegations involved rumours which had been circulating for years of dead babies being buried on the grounds of the former Kuper Island IRS. The task force travelled to Kuper Island (now Penelakut Island) on February 24, 1999, where, with the Band's permission, they excavated an area which had been identified as a burial ground. The contractors dug down until they encountered undisturbed soil. Although excavation revealed no evidence to support the claim of burials, the Penelakut Band continues to peddle the claim of missing indigenous children buried in unmarked graves..WATCH: Keeping (taxpayer-funded) porn out of schools.Although Project E-NIRS members looked into records detailing literally dozens of deaths at various residential schools across BC, most of these occurred during the 1930s and 1940s and were directly attributable to the epidemics then sweeping the country, including tuberculosis, meningitis, measles, rheumatic fever, and smallpox.In short, Project E-NIRS’s principal finding was that after an intensive eight-year investigation, the RCMP found no evidence whatsoever of the murder or clandestine burial of missing IRS students, a result also confirmed by a detailed 2011 archival report titled The Role of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police during the Indian Residential School system..Among its many other revelations, the report indirectly explains why the RCMP took a hands-off approach when the Kamloops Band announced on May 27, 2021, that “the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”It has been suggested that the late Murray Sinclair, former Chair of the TRC, pressured the RCMP to allow the Band to take unprecedented control over all parts of what some commentators quickly called genocide..THOMAS: Let's shut down Calgary city council until after the election; yes, that can happen.A more compelling explanation is that the RCMP failed to investigate because senior RCMP officials in BC and Ottawa were aware that the former Kamloops Indian Residential School had been thoroughly investigated between 1995 and 2003, and that the 2003 task force report established that the Band made no claims to the task force of missing or murdered children or clandestine burials. On the contrary, the task force received relatively few complaints of any kind from the Kamloops Band.Meanwhile, over four years later, there has never been “confirmation” of the Kamloops’ “discovery” or its many cross-country copycats.If there is any “stark truth,” it is that the history, operation, and legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools have been grossly misrepresented by biased, rent-seeking activists, and their gullible supporters, indigenous and non-indigenous alike.Hymie Rubenstein, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is the editor of REAL Indigenous Report.