A Great Book takes on the Indigenous Industry’s lies

A Review by Colin Alexander

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By Colin Alexander

Dead Wrong: How Canada got the residential school story so wrong, C.P. Champion (Author/editor) and Tom Flanagan (Author/editor), Truth North and Dorchester Books, 409 pp., 2025, $22.99.

This book is a powerful sequel to the editors’ Grave Error. It debunks one falsehood after another deployed to support Indigenous assertions—with corresponding demands for ever more billions of taxpayers’ money. Indigenous elites, and many followers, override any semblance of intellectual honesty. Historian Michael Wood says this of his discipline’s methodology:

“Primary sources—first hand, contemporary, authoritative, corroborated—are the basis of any historical narrative. This is the key principle of historical research. It all comes down to interpretation of the evidence. What does this document tell me? What is the authority of this text? Can I be sure that what it tells me is true? Am I reading it to corroborate a picture I’ve already decided on?”

History is always subject to reconsideration, by questioning evidence and new interpretation. The facts stated in Dead Wrong are unrebuttable, and its conclusions withstand rigorous scrutiny.

Jonathan Kay castigates The New York Times for not correcting Ian Austen’s May 28, 2021 news story titled “Horrible History: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.” Austen had accepted without question Chief Rosanne Casimir’s announcement that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) confirmed the remains of 215 children buried in the orchard next to the Kamloops Indian Residential School (IRS).

Speaking for outlying communities, BC’s Grand Chief Stewart Phillip then said it was “a fundamental human right to bury our loved ones at home.” Accordingly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave the Kamloops Band $12 million for their exhumation.

Four years later, there is not a single name unaccounted for and there has been no digging. GPR shows only ground disturbance—in this case, drainage tiles laid in 1924. It cannot identify graves.

Retired judge Brian Giesbrecht tells of fifteen lawyers, led by Alberta’s Brendan Miller, who tried to have the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigate Canada for genocide. Without a shred of evidence, they wrote:

“What happened to these 215 children … is evidence of murder, extermination, forcible transfer of a population, rape/sexual slavery, persecution against an identifiable group, enforced disappearance of person, apartheid, and general inhumane acts.”

James Pew writes about BC’s Law Society requiring provincial lawyers to take a course saying the ostensible burial site held the remains of those children. Pew notes that BC’s Chief Justice, Len Marchand, who is Indigenous, had said in court that “there are no bodies that have been unearthed.”

Accordingly, lawyers Jim Heller and Mark Berry asked the Law Society to revise the course material to say there was “potentially” a burial site. This mild correction was rejected, and vicious insinuations of racism led to the filing of a libel action against the Law Society. Both Giesbrecht and Pew deplore the Alberta lawyers’ and the BC Law Society’s professional inadequacy. In my book, Justice on Trial, I tell of many horror stories arising from want of accountability.

A superb essay by Frances Widdowson demolishes the Indigenous-led argument for changing the name of Powell River, a small city on the BC coast. The nearby Band claims the name is racist and an affront to the quest for reconciliation. The city was named after Israel Powell, who was demonstrably sympathetic to Indians. He was BC’s first Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and the first Chancellor of the University of British Columbia.

The Band commissioned Know History, a commercial research organization, to make the case for shedding Powell’s name. They then reported that Powell sponsored assimilationist policies that were harmful to Indians, and that he “was part of a system whose primary goal was to extinguish Indigenous culture and identity.”

It eludes Canadians who denounce assimilation that today’s Indigenous elites are fully assimilated, and they live a middle-class lifestyle. And they have the Indspire awards for those whose assimilation has been noteworthy. Specifically too, it eluded the Know History people that several Chiefs asked the government to ban the potlatch, on the grounds that the unconstrained gift-giving ceremony impaired the wellbeing of their people.

Widdowson reports that off-duty paramedic Ted Vizzutti, organized a campaign to inform Powell River’s residents of the proposed name change. For doing that he was fired from his job, and the union recommended that he accept early retirement. After retiring, Vizzutti discovered that he was now barred from working as a paramedic in BC.

Jim McMurtry tells a similar story. One morning, the school’s PA system told teachers to interrupt their lessons to discuss the apparent discovery of human remains at Kamloops. He was fired for truthfully correcting a pupil’s misconceptions. She had claimed that priests were murderers who tortured students to death by leaving them out in the snow to die. McMurtry also relates how Prime Minister Mark Carney threw under the bus his father Robert’s scholarly legacy. He had been a school principal in the Northwest Territories, and the subject of his Ph.D. thesis was Indigenous education.

Canada still fails abysmally to house a burgeoning underclass or to enable next generations for the mainstream economy—that is not where the money goes. But contrary to the widely promoted narrative, the residential schools did much good. Rodney Clifton’s chapter tells of his own rewarding experience on the staff of residential schools in Inuvik and then on the Blackfoot Reserve in Alberta. Except for orphans and children in abusive or neglectful homes, no children were snatched from what are said to have been loving families. Parents had to sign an admission form. The long list of success stories includes architect Douglas Cardinal, thoracic surgeon Noah Carpenter, playwright Thomson Highway and numerous former cabinet ministers, senators and territorial premiers.

Yes, there is evidence of isolated cases of serious abuse in the IRS in the early years of the twentieth century—as you would also find for many boarding schools in England at that time. But I know of only one credible case since 1945 where abuse and neglect were systemic. The Ukkavik residence in Iqaluit opened despite protests from the outlying settlements where parents knew of the community’s societal dysfunction. Under Inuit management, attendees were allowed to go out on the town whoring and getting drunk. The former mayor of Iqaluit Bryan Pearson, who was also the undertaker, told me that two attendees committed suicide.

Obviously false allegations have energized an industry looking to suppress fact-finding. They call it denialism—as in Holocaust denial. Dead Wrong is a necessary antidote for many false claims about the IRS. Historian E.H. Carr foresaw how people might misuse history when he wrote:

“History should never be a weapon at the heart of culture wars. Sadly, once again, it is clumsily wielded by those who deliberately seek to impose a clear ideological agenda. History is becoming the handmaiden of identity politics and self-flagellation. This only promotes poor, one-dimensional understandings of the past and continually diminishes the utility of the field.”

Lies have been weaponized to promote many Indigenous claims. This dishonesty is reminiscent of Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. He said: “If you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”

Dead Wrong along with Grave Error go a long way to correct Indigenous lies. Canadians should read these two books which, in late December 2025, are best sellers on Amazon.

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Colin Alexander was publisher of the Yellowknife News of the North. His latest books are Justice on Trial and Ballad of Sunny Ways. He is retired and lives in Ottawa.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Canada’s Apartheid Manifesto

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