Woke Watch Canada is a reader-supported publication. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber or making a one-time or recurring donation to show your support.
By Jacques Rouillard, retired professor emeritus from the Department of History at the University of Montreal
At their recent General Assembly, First Nations leaders adopted an emergency resolution calling on the federal government to criminalize Holocaust denial regarding Indigenous residential schools and classify it as hate speech. The aim is to equate this viewpoint with denial of the Nazi Holocaust, which is recognized as a crime under the Criminal Code of Canada. According to the resolution’s author, Chief David Monias, “when people deny or minimize the history [of residential schools], they do more than just denying [sic] the past; they reopen the wounds of survivors, they dishonor the children, they fuel Anti-First Nations racism. Reconciliation cannot exist if truth is questioned or erased.” [1]
New Democratic Party MP Leah Gazan introduced a bill to that effect in 2024, but it died on the order paper, and senators by a vote of 41 to 31 refused to amend a new hate crimes bill accordingly last June. The Assembly of First Nations reaffirms its commitment to continuing its fight to criminalize those who promote a view of history with which they disagree.
The First Nations’ resolution remains rather vague, and I wonder if I could have been prosecuted for a hate crime for stating that it was the Indigenous nations themselves who requested the establishment of schools when Canada took possession of the vast territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. The Canadian government feared that the United States would annex these territories as the American West was being settled. It therefore took charge of the Indigenous nations living there, whose population reached 88,680 by 1905. [2]
To establish its authority, it concluded eleven numbered treaties with Indigenous nations between 1871 and 1921 covering much of these lands, from northern Ontario to northern British Columbia, including the Yukon. In exchange for the surrender of their territorial rights and their subjugation to the Dominion of Canada, the government provided, among other things, reserve lands, annuities, agricultural equipment, and the permanent right to hunt and fish on unoccupied Crown lands. [3]
All the treaties also included provisions for the construction of schools and the hiring of teachers to educate Indigenous children. The government’s negotiator for four treaties, Alexander Morris, wrote that Indigenous chiefs were requesting schools and teachers to “teach the children the science of the white man” because “the new generation can be trained in the habits and ways of civilized life and prepared to face the difficulties they will be surrounded by the influx of settlers, and fitted for maintaining themselves as tillers of the soil.” [4]
In its 2015 report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) also acknowledges that schools enabled Indigenous peoples “to gain the skills that would allow them to continue to control their own destinies and retain their culture and identity as Aboriginal peoples.” [5] The TRC’s historical account even goes so far as to specify that it was the Indigenous leaders themselves who, at the outset of negotiations, requested that schools be included in the treaties. [6]
However, the summary of the TRC report takes the surprising position that Indigenous leaders “never asked for residential schools as part of the Treaty process, and neither did the government suggest that such schools would be established.” [7] It is pointed out that the term “residential school” is not used in the treaties. However, a residential school is an educational institution with the distinction that students are housed and fed in buildings also dedicated to academic instruction. Residential schools served as schools for children in many Indigenous communities that were too remote for them to attend a day school.
Contrary to what is often claimed, residential schools enrolled only one-third of Indigenous children throughout their history. Approximately 40 to 50 percent attended on-reserve day schools, where children returned home at the end of the day. In 1951, there were 31day schools in Quebec (2,095 students) and 365 across Canada (15,478), where parents could voluntarily enroll their children. [8] How else could they adapt and function in the society around them without knowledge of Western culture?
In Quebec and the Maritimes, there were no residential schools for Indigenous communities until the 1950s and 1960s because the Aboriginal Nations had not signed treaties with the government.[9] The residential schools were established under the guidance of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who convinced Premier Louis Saint-Laurent of their necessity so that Indigenous youth could learn to read, write, and count, and pursue their salvation through the Christian religion.
I agree with the author of the resolution submitted to the Senate: “Reconciliation cannot exist if truth is questioned or erased.” But this truth must be based first and foremost on written documents resulting from scientific research, not on oral tradition.
[1] Chief David Monias, Assembly of First Nations passes Residential School Denialism resolution on opening day, The Turtle Island News, July 15, 2026.
[2] Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, 1906, p. 424.
[3] Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1: From the Origins to 1939, 2015, pp. 115–122.
[4] Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, Including the Negotiations on which they were Based, and Other Information Relating thereto, Toronto, Belfords, Clarke and Company, 1880, pp. 49, 93, 185, 215, 292, in Final Report…, p. 121.
[5] Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honoring the Truth, Reconciliation for the Future, 2015, p. 53.
[6] Final Report of the TRC…, p. 121.
[7] Summary of the Final Report of the TRC…, p. 53.
[8] Canada, Indian Affairs Branch, Department of Citizenship and Immigration, Annual Report, 1951, p. 45.
[9] It should be noted that in the early 1930s, two small boarding schools – one Protestant and the other Catholic – were established at Fort George (James Bay) on the border between Quebec and Ontario. They admitted pupils from both provinces, although it is highly likely that they were built primarily to accommodate children from northern Ontario. This territory was part of Treaty No. 9, signed with the Indigenous communities. The only residential school in the Maritimes, the one at Shubenacadie in Nova Scotia, admitted its first pupils in the early 1930s; it was established “ to serve as a child-welfare facility “ (Final Report of the TRC…, p. 282.
Thanks for reading. For more on this topic, read Integration, Forced Assimilation, or Genocide
Follow Woke Watch Canada on X: @WokeWatchCanada
Or, by contributing to our Donor Box:
Censorship is the tool of authoritarians from left to right who cannot convince much of the general population of their falsehoods and lies.
Without day and residential schools, “how else could they adapt and function in the society around them without knowledge of Western culture?”
No one on the woke left can answer this question.