Defending Grave Error

A Letter Writing Call to Action: Quesnel City Council, the Media and Free Speech

Image from the Cowichan Valley Citizen

By James Pew

A week ago today, I wrote in these pages about the Outrage over Grave Error that occurred in Quesnel B.C, after Pat Morton, the wife of the city’s current Mayor, had lent a copy of the book, Grave Error (of which I am a contributing author), to a trusted friend, who then went on to throw Pat under the bus. As if reading a book and lending it to a friend was some sort of crime. In the ensuing drama, Pat’s husband, Mayor Ron Paull, also threw his wife under the bus when asked about it. Paull claimed he looked at the cover of Grave Error, but had no interest in reading it. He then voted to denounce the book he had no interest in reading.

Then on Monday the 25th, in response to the controversy, I published the press release that was circulated to Canadian media. And yesterday I published Michelle Stirling’s take, Crisis in Quesnel: Grave Error and the Truth.

In addition to all of the ink spilled on the issue here at Woke Watch Canada, two other pieces I co-wrote with my colleague, anthropologist, firebrand, and the editor of the Real Indigenous Report, Hymie Rubenstein, were also published this week. The first one, Collaborating in Indigenous Privilege , appeared in the Dorchester Review. And the second piece, In Quesnel, they can't handle the truth, was published in the Western Standard.

Today I am sharing a number of letters written by various Canadians to the Quesnel city council -and to editorial departments of some Canadian media who reported on the story with much bias. The letters express concerns over the implications of censoring (and denouncing) Grave Error. Further, I call Woke Watch Canada readers to action, and request that you write your own letters to the Quesnel city council and to the irresponsible media who continue to propagate untruths about unmarked graves and former Indian Residential Schools.

Thank you in advance to all who write letters in support of Grave Error and free speech!

Here is the contact info for the Quesnel City Council:

General enquiry

City Hall
410 Kinchant Street
Quesnel B.C.
V2J 7J5

Telephone: 250-992-2111
Fax: 250-992-1512
Email: cityhall@quesnel.ca

And here are emails for the councillors:

<rpaull@quesnel.ca>, <selliott@quesnel.ca>, <tgoulet@quesnel.ca>, <dmckelvie@quesnel.ca>, <lroodenburg@quesnel.ca>, <mrunge@quesnel.ca>, <mvik@quesnel.ca> <brodie.fenlon@cbc.ca>, <editor@quesnelobserver.com>, <lisaboudreau@sd28.bc.ca>

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Defending Grave Error

A Letter Writing Call to Action: Quesnel City Council and Free Speech

First up, are two letters to the Quesnel city council from former Manitoba attorney general James McCrae. The first is short but makes a compelling point:

“… we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care. These experiences must also be heard.” - former Truth and Reconciliation Commission Chair Murray Sinclair, August 2010 - Calgary Herald

Why is it okay for Murray Sinclair to refer to the dedication, compassion and commitment of IRS staff, but not for anyone else?  

Remember, too, that perhaps thousands of IRS staffers were Indigenous people. What an insult to them to accuse them of abuse and atrocity!  Were they all abusers, too?

Wake up!

James C. McCrae

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James McCrae also wrote a longer letter to the Mayor and council:

You have responded to none of my messages to you; no need for anyone to wonder why.

In the whole Quesnel/Lhtako/Morton/Paull affair, the only person with any personal integrity is Pat Morton. She is the only one with sufficient courage to stand up for truth. The rest of you are sheep. 

It's so easy, isn't it, when you let emotion take over and let truth be ignored, when exaggeration and making things up rule the day?

Isn't it time the whole council apologized to Ms. Morton and to the thousands of Indigenous and other people who worked at the Indian residential schools to provide impoverished Indigenous kids with food, shelter, clothing, education and - yes - love? Many of those kids came from broken or dysfunctional families. Some had no parents at all. Others’ parents were busy trying to make a living fishing, trapping, hunting or working in lumber industries. They wanted their kids looked after and educated. They wanted their kids to learn English so they could thrive in a changing world.

Because of your bullying and manipulation, none of those Indigenous IRS staffers dares defend themselves from your careless allegations of abuse and atrocity. 

Nobody is allowed to acknowledge any of the good work done, especially by those Indigenous teachers, matrons, cooks, cleaners and others. 

If this is what Quesnel is all about, who would want to live there? You folks have done a great job of ruining your community’s reputation. 

But perhaps I have it all wrong. Perhaps your only objective is to get rid of your mayor. If so, have the courage to say so. But leave Ms. Morton alone!

Along the way, will someone please tell me which school Lawrence Goulet attended, and when? Was Mr. Goulet abused? If so, by whom? Some detail might lend some credibility to Councillor Goulet's story; he was a little short on details, but long on emotion and rhetoric.

And perhaps you will find out how many Lhtako kids went to residential schools, and what happened to them, before bullying people any further. The chief says there was a significant number. Define "significant number", please.

Emotion and weeping rhetoric keep the cameras rolling, Tony, but responsible people and people of integrity allow other people to have their say.

You are all involved in an effort to manipulate and bully your fellow citizens; shame on all of you!

James McCrae, Brandon, Mb.

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Here is a letter from Bill Wyn:

Dear Mayor and Councilors,

I write to you regarding your recent decision to ban the book “Grave Error“ and express my deep concern for the Council’s judgment in this matter.  I urge you to reconsider and apologize for this mistake to muzzle such an important, measured and accurate piece of Canadian literature.

My name is Bill Wynn. I’m a retired history school teacher, school counsellor, school principal, division administrator and educational consultant. I hold Bachelor’s degrees in psychology, history and education. I also hold a MEd in educational administration and school psychology. 

I have studied Canadian history and taught it in Canadian public schools. I have performed the majority of my educational work in Manitoba, five years of which was spent as a counselling consultant in Frontier School Division developing and supporting school counseling programs on First Nations Frontier schools throughout the North. I worked directly with Indigenous Cree and Ojibway elders assisting them to develop therapeutic counselling skills and strategies to assist and  support Aboriginal youth dealing with an array of traumas and mental illnesses primarily associated with alcoholism, drug, sex  addiction and domestic, physical and sexual abuse. I am closely familiar with the IRS history through empirical evidence, first person accounts shared with me by Indigenous elders in northern schools and indigenous people who attended IRSs. I also have family members who taught in the IRS system. 

Your action muzzling the book’s narratives in Grave Error, highlights Canada’s mass hysteria and moral panic caused by radar images and an unproven genocide narrative three years ago created by the Indigenous Activist Industry and Federal Government. It is alarming to see yet another Canadian civic authority like your council captured by the spell of this cult like anti-truth activism.  

The degree of half truths, myths and other delusions fabricated about radar images discovered in old graveyards throughout Canada for three years now have reached the absurd. To date there is not a shred of forensic evidence of an Indian school child genocide. 

For our government to declare the IRS a genocide without a speck of physical evidence or any large scale investigation into a national genocide is INSANITY defined; a complete failure of national leadership in my opinion. 

The documented empirical evidence of the majority of Indian child deaths in IRSs are due to tuberculosis clearly outlined in many historical reports,  medical reports, death certificates and other credible sources including indigenous first person accounts. 

There have only been a handful of documented child abuse cases in the 150 year IRS history. None to my knowledge involved murder by an employee of the IRS. 

Most of the abuse that went on in IRS schools was amongst the students themselves. Older Indian children often bullied and harassed smaller or younger Indian children. There was sexual abuse too. The schools were also widely used as child orphanages and abuse shelters as no such supports existed in that era for children, Indian or non Indian and many of the children carried mental illnesses and emotional traumas from abuse in  their home communities. Yes there were instances of racism by some IRS employees and some unfortunate and tragic situations like there have been in all other school settings. No one can deny that. But nothing reaching the bar of genocide. 

The schools of that era used corporal punishment as did all public schools in the country. I grew up in a small town in the early 60s and was terrified of our principal who yelled, used the strap, chalk brushes, rulers and chalk to discipline students. Many of us as children saw our principal as a monster who killed kids during lunchtime or after school. We spoke on the playground together of rumours of him dismembering other children in the school’s basement boiler room. Most of my or other childhood memories of IRS children CANNOT be truthful verified with evidence. 

Many of the Indian children that died at or while attending IRS contracted tuberculosis by exposure to infected students coming from reservations where infection rates were much higher than the schools. Most schools across the country were poorly built or resourced improperly to contain the illness spread. They were later improved with new medical understanding of infection, time and available taxpayers money. Many schools were overwhelmed by Indian parents trying to get their children into the schools because they knew it would be to their betterment. But overall, only a small percentage of Indian children attended IRS. And many of those thrived and did well. 

To dismiss the scholarly work by the authors of Grave Error, you disrespect all Canadians. Indigenous Canadians that have been lied to and betrayed by their own leaders and those in Ottawa that have lied to all Canadians. 

More importantly, by suppressing  the truth as you have done by banning this book, it further threatens our future as a nation. It helps enable our education system to teach these genocide lies to our children. This breaks the sacred trust your office must uphold for your community’s future leaders and citizens.  It also sends the exact opposite message to Indigenous students needed to ground their futures in a Canada that appreciates them and needs their contributions as citizens. The truth is like the air they need to rise above the lies of victimhood fed to them by their own and non indigenous leaders that have betrayed them. 

Banning this book also cancels the truth of the thousands of honest and decent Canadians who gave of themselves in the service to Canada’s Indigenous peoples over its 150 year existence. They did not participate in the genocide of the Indian children they taught, loved and cared for while in their charge. 

If you want to send a truth and reconciling message to your citizens and indeed the Country, consider taking political action by writing to our Prime Minister and every First Nation leader hiring radar finders to excavate each radar image found to date, identify any remains and forensically determine its DNA and cause of death. Each should be returned to its family via DNA tagging so that proper closure can be done by each child’s family. In addition, the cause of death to each verifiable school child found should be made known to all Canadians in a public report to verify the truth of the alleged genocide and its scope. Once verified evidence of genocide is established, demand our government conduct a full scale enquiry and prosecution of all government, church and indigenous individuals involved in this despicable crime against humanity. All must be held accountable for this atrocity if proven guilty. This action would legitimize rewriting our country’s history books too if the genocide is valid. 

It would also prove, if no evidence is found, the political HOAX and GRAFT SCAM that it most likely is. 

This is the very least we as a country can do to reconcile with First Nations peoples. Let’s start with the TRUTH. 

Thank you for your attention,

Yours truly,

Bill Wynn B.A., B.Ed, M.Ed

Lake Audy, MB. 

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And here is a letter from Shannon Lee Manion, a board member of the Indian Residential School Research Group (IRSRG), to Frank Peebles, an opinion writer of the Quesnel Cariboo Observer, who wrote “The Quesnel board of education and superintendent confirm receipt of the book titled Grave Error – How Media Misled us (and the Truth about Residential Schools), and the district denounces this book”:

The stack of books on my bedside table is eclectic. There's a Dick Francis trilogy, for the horsey girl in me; a large tome containing 1001 Home Hints, for the DIYer; and sandwiched in between is Grave Error, How the Media Misled Us, (and the Truth about Residential Schools) by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan. It is there so that I might broaden my knowledge on how things have been and how they are going for our Indigenous population. 

It's within reach and so far, I have not grown horns or started drooling uncontrollably. Dipping into it from time to time, I can attest that I am not developing a hairy chest or knuckles as though I'm morphing into a Neanderthal. I'm who I've always been and my friends and colleagues are still speaking to me. 

Why then, in reading about Mayor Paull, his wife, Pat Morton and Quesnel’s City Council, does it feel as if I have an arrow sticking out of my heart. 

In your city, the slings and arrows are not of outrageous fortune, they are simply outrageous. That someone cannot share a book with another without bringing wrath, not only upon themselves but also members of their family because the recipient might derive information or insight, is outright censorship.

Last time I checked, we had freedom of thought in our country.

Shannon Lee Mannion 

Ottawa, ON

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Thanks for reading. For more on indigenous issues, read the new series by an anonymous Canadian educator on education and reconciliation, “Reconciliation Education”- Part 1

BREAKING NEWS:

1. A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

2. James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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