Dissecting “First Nations chiefs blast Senate for not outlawing residential school denialism”
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By Hymie Rubenstein
A July 17 Juno News post titled “First Nations chiefs blast Senate for not outlawing residential school denialism” deserves careful dissection, which I have done in embedded call-and-response fashion, “blasting” the claims made by the chiefs in the process.
The news piece by Juno News’ Alex Dhaliwal reports that Indian Band chiefs making up the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) passed an emergency resolution at its annual general assembly on July 14 calling on Canada to criminalize the poorly defined notion of residential school denialism.
The motion implicitly criticized the rejection by Canada’s Senate of an amendment to Bill C-9 whose effect would have been to criminalize the denial of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system, but the Juno News report does not examine the chiefs’ assertions. The amendment was defeated with a 41-32 vote on Wednesday, June 3. The chiefs argued that denying the abuses of the residential school system constitutes hate speech and should be punishable by law, a problematic assertion if there ever was one.
Alex Dhaliwal: The push for “truth and reconciliation” collided with unresolved questions Thursday [July 16] as First Nation chiefs blasted Parliament for refusing to criminalize Indian Residential School “denialism.” No remains have been excavated to verify the headline-making burial site claims.
Hymie Rubenstein: The absence of excavated remains should have been more than sufficient to put a lid on criminalization, but this does not seem to have been the grounds used in the Senate vote. As reported by the CBC, several leaders, including Anishinabek Nation Grand Council Chief Linda Debassige and AFN B.C. Regional Chief Terry Teegee, said they spoke to the Senate about including residential school denialism in the recently passed Combating Hate Act (Bill C-9). By a 41-32 vote, the Senate rejected the proposed amendment to add it to the bill. A spokesperson for the Justice Minister said in a statement that the Combating Hate Act, being considered by the Senate, was intended to make spaces such as places of worship, schools, cultural centres, and community spaces safer by strengthening laws against hate crimes. “Indian Residential School denialism is a serious and distinct issue that does not fit within the scope of what the Combating Hate Act was designed to do,” said the statement.
“Our government has said this issue warrants dedicated further parliamentary study. Any legal response should be developed carefully in genuine consultation and co-operation [with] Indigenous peoples and the communities most affected.”
A.D.: “It is a shame that we live in a country that will not protect our people from hate crimes,” Manitoba Grand Chief Garrison Settee of Pimicikamak Cree Nation told reporters Thursday at the AFN AGM in Ottawa.
H.R.: Questioning the results of the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Report on the history, operation, and legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential School (IRS) system by, for example, presenting contrary evidence hardly constitutes a “hate crime.” Spreading false information about the schools, as its indigenous and other detractors have done for years, a disreputable activity to be sure, also needs to be carefully examined before it can be called a “hate crime” against the thousands of people, many of them aboriginals, who helped operate the IRSs.
A.D.: [A]n amendment to Bill C-9 that would have made publicly condoning, denying, or downplaying the Indian Residential School system a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in prison.
H.R.: The vagueness of these grounds should strike fear in the hearts of all freedom-loving Canadians because of their possible self-interested application by zealous critics of the IRS system. Those who should be worried the most are the many indigenous students who have reported that their IRS attendance was a highly beneficial experience.
A.D.: B.C. Regional Chief Terry Teegee of Takla First Nation condemned the vote, calling residential school denialism “hate speech,” not “an academic debate.”
H.R.: Yes, I am a retired academic whose interest in reading and writing about the IRS experience is solely rooted in an effort to set the record straight about the good, bad, and ugly aspects of IRS life. In doing so, I’ve used the same scientific methods and impartial standards that have guided my research and writing since the earliest days of my university studies in 1962.
A.D.: “It’s been five years since the 215 findings at the Kamloops Indian Residential School site,” Teegee said. “Other places across this country have been finding graves.”
H.R.: As has been repeatedly shown, not a single grave containing the remains of a murdered indigenous child dumped in a shallow grave close to an IRS has ever been found. Likewise, there is not a shred of credible evidence of a single child having been murdered by a staff member at any IRS.
A.D.: Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc [Kamloops BC Indian Band] said it discovered 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops residential school in 2021 and received $12.1 million from Ottawa for excavation, forensic testing and DNA analysis.
H.R.: None of this money was used for “excavation, forensic testing and DNA analysis.”
A.D.: Anthropologist Sarah Beaulieu, who led the original ground-penetrating radar survey, said in 2021 that the findings were about 200 unconfirmed “targets of interest” consistent with possible graves that would require excavation to verify.
H.R.: This necessary excavation has never occurred. Indeed, it will never take place because there are no missing children buried on a site where ground penetrating radar has revealed only disturbed soil.
A.D.: Many early reports referred to “mass graves,” though Tk’emlúps never used the term.
H.R.: This is false. In an early July 2021 annual meeting of the Assembly of First Nations, Kamloops Chief Rosanne Casimir referred to the May 27, 2021 “discovery” of the remains of 215 Kamloops IRS students as consisting of a “mass grave” constituting “genocide” against indigenous people.
A.D.: Tk’emlúps has shifted language from “anomalies” and “unmarked burials” to “potential burials,” and says it hopes to begin excavation in 2027 pending consent from about 120 affiliated bands.
H.R: It would be impossible to gain the unanimous approval for excavation from these 120 or so affiliated bands, a requirement long demanded by Casimir.
A.D.: Kamloops Chief Rosanne Casimir told a Senate committee on Mar. 25 that no attempt had been made to recover remains. “The truth cannot be confirmed,” she said.
“Holocaust investigations have continued for more than 75 years,” Chief Casimir told senators. “Truth takes time.”
H.R.: A totally distorted assertion. Although Holocaust research continues to this day, the remains of millions of its victims have long been verified. As for its supposed Canadian counterpart — the execution of IRS students — not a single name attached to a single problematic burial has been ascertained, as the following excerpt from the Juno News story shows:
Access-to-information records show Crown-Indigenous Relations released heavily redacted 2023 reports on the First Nation’s “missing children” work. By then, it had received $8.4 million of a $12.1 million grant tied to the reported 215 burial sites.
According to Blacklock’s, the federal government spent $246.7 million supporting nearly 150 Indigenous communities by Mar. 2025, while funding requests totalled $704.3 million.
Government records show funding covered investigative and commemorative work, but no remains have been excavated or confirmed through forensic or DNA testing.
A.D.: Former residential school student Sen. Mary Jane McCallum said families deserve answers. “I want those bodies taken home,” she said. “Remove them from that site.”
H.R.: What bodies on which site?
A.D.: A 2025 Angus Reid poll found 63 percent of Canadians support exhumation to verify burial claims, including 60 percent in B.C. Among Indigenous respondents, 56 percent said verification is needed before accepting the claims.
H.R.: If most Canadians were paying close attention to the findings of the so-called denialists, this figure would be close to 100 percent.
Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
Thanks for reading. For more on this topic read, Transparency Issues at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal
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Just so everyone knows (and it should be obvious) the FNs are using Holocaust protocols adopted by some nations such as Germany where denial is punishable. The difference is that Germany experienced widespread and direct nation-wide suffering over this issue including obviously those killed in the camps or in the field — but also all Germans have gained a permanent mark of censure on them for this. Critically, the records and proof are absolutely undeniable. Anyone who does so is essentially someone who cannot do simple arithmetic.
That is simply not the case with the residential schools, where all evidence of good has been suppressed (to the point one is not allowed to even read about such in the TRC report). The bad aspects have been grossly exaggerated or misinterpreted. Most critically all of this has been as a result of a major planned assault on all Cdn institutions to use the residential schools as leverage to extract cash payments or land “back”. It has been quite successful and when success is seen, those in charge have ramped up the clarion calls for grief, sorrow, demonstrations, (burning of churches?), etc — without providing any proof that the latest rationale for such sorrow is true.
That the chiefs (at all levels) continue to refuse to actually scientifically prove their cases should be an indicator that something is amiss.
Like many things going on in Canada, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors - made to look as they want it to look.