Senate Testimony Reveals Missing Children’s Names and Graves are on Ancestry.com

Thoughts from a non-indigenous elder

The article originally appeared on Michelle Stirling’s Medium profile.

By

Michelle Stirling

The Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples just released a report titled, “Honoring the Children Who Never Came Home: Truth, Education and Reconciliation.” In it they strongly advocate for censoring people like me who like to educate you with the truth about Indian Residential Schools so that we can find meeting points for reconciliation. They state it this way as Recommendation 6: “That the Government of Canada take every action necessary to combat the rise of residential school denialism.”

Wow. That sure flies in the face of my sacred Canadian creed:

“I am Canadian, a free Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship God in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, free to choose those who govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.” (John Diefenbaker, House of Commons Debates, 1 July 1960)

In the transcript of the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples of 21 March 2023, Kimberly Murray testifies her frustration that they can’t find an international judicial body to charge Canada with genocide, because a number of people have said Indian Residential Schools were genocide.

Kimberly Murray was appointed by an Order in Council to be Special Interlocutor under this mandate: “The Special Interlocutor will function independently and impartially, in a non-partisan and transparent manner to achieve the objectives of her mandate.”

In her interim report “Sacred Responsibilities…,” she breaches that federal mandate saying: “I want to emphasize this point: my role is to give voice to the children. It is not to be neutral or objective — it is to be a fierce and fearless advocate to ensure that the bodies and Spirits of the missing children are treated with the care, respect, and dignity that they deserve.”

Thus, the intended-to-be-impartial Special Interlocutor said to the Senate committee: “We have said in this country, over and over, it was genocide. It was genocide. Senator Audette said that in the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Former senator Murray Sinclair said it. A former Supreme Court of Canada Justice said it. Most recently, Canada said it and passed that motion. So what now? Where is the accountability? If the International Criminal Court isn’t going to take steps to hold the state accountable, then absolutely, we need to find another mechanism.”

Saying the word ‘genocide’ does not make it so.

Concerning in the Senate testimony is the reference to former Senator Murray Sinclair’s off-the-cuff claim that there may be 25,000 lost children or more. There is no evidence to support this statement, but because it has been made by such a prominent Indigenous person, it is now taken as gospel. I say there is no evidence (other than oral statements from elders or former students, who are recalling events from their childhood and who do not account for such numbers in their statements) because we have no records of reports to police of missing students who were not accounted for.

Think about that.

Over the course of more than one hundred years, and 150,000 student attendees, there are no documented cases of missing persons reports by parents about students at Indian Residential Schools, who are not accounted for in the school, hospital, sanitoria, Indian Agent, or death records. The Sinclair comment appears in the Senate testimony related to trying to find an external, expert organization to help with exhumations and forensic work:

“We did find one, and that is the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, or FAFG. They have been engaged in this work for the past 30 years. They are dealing, essentially, with Indigenous people — the Mayans who were caught up in their internal conflicts. Thus far, they have exhumed, identified and repatriated in excess of 7,000 individuals — and many more to go — of an estimated 40,000 individuals who were disappeared in their internal conflicts.”

“You will know from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, from former chief commissioner, Murray Sinclair — your fellow senator at one point — his estimate was something in the nature of 25,000 Indigenous children were lost.”

The Mayan people of Guatemala were subjected to an actual physical genocide, which is curiously frequently compared to Canadian Indian Residential School experiences in many academic works. On this basis alone, it seems that UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Human Rights, José Francisco Calí Tzay, who is Mayan Kakchiquel, should have recused himself from his investigation, and a more impartial individual should have been engaged. Calí Tzay spent 10 days here in March and based on that short visit and a submission made to him by Kimberly Murray in January of 2023, claimed that Indian Residential Schools had an ‘appalling legacy.’ Ten days seems a fleeting time to make such an assessment of more than one hundred years of history. It is unclear by what right civil servant Kimberly Murray had in sending such documentation to Calí Tzay. Murray also sent a six page report to the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in March of 2023. Her original role was to be a liaison between the self-described residential school survivors and to make recommendations to the Justice Minister. It feels like she far overstepped her mandate by sending these unvetted, unofficial reports to international agencies and she has prejudiced Canada’s case in the international realm, especially when China has accused Canada of genocide at the UN.

I worked on a documentary in the 1980’s on genocide. I read dozens of peer-reviewed papers and historical books. Sadly, I also had to watch hours of horrific archival footage of the many genocides of the 20th century. Ultimately, our finished documentary was so depressing, we decided not to release it.

One of the bizarre ironies of history we found in some of the archival footage is that of the Nazi’s invading Ukraine on their way to attack Moscow. They were stopped in their tracks by the discovery of mass graves of Ukrainian victims of Stalin’s genocidal Holodomor. The Nazis being keen on documentation, they photographed and filmed it, thus proving what brave journalists like Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge had secretly snuck in to report on. It should be noted that the New York Times employed a Russian double agent, Walter Duranty, who wrote articles dismissing claims of the intentional starvation of the Ukrainian kulaks. The newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for his disinformation. For LYING to the public. They got a Pulitzer. My point? Genocide means intentional murdering of hundreds of thousands or millions of your own people. Canada never did that.

No surprise that the New York Times was also front and centre, with headline reporting of a ‘mass grave of 215 children’s bodies’ found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. All that was found were soil disturbances, tracked by Ground Penetrating Radar. For some bizarre reason, the RCMP were called off the investigation — which normally would be deemed obstruction of justice. But here we are.

In Canada today, we are no longer under Canadian law, but rather under some uneasy, unidentifiable blend of Indigenous law. Whatever that is. Indigenous law appears to be whatever a particular band or First Nation claim it to be. No one can verify it because Indigenous people did not have any written language until Europeans arrived, and ironically, it was the priests — particularly the Oblates — who made a concerted effort to create syllabics and dictionaries to ensure the languages were preserved. Indigenous law was oral law. Canadian law is written law, and ‘case law’ — hundreds of thousands of legal cases documented over centuries, guides decisions of today.

Indigenous law references crop up a number of times in the Senate transcripts. This is due to the Canadian government’s adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) for which an “Action Plan” was issued, just four days after Kimberly Murray’s interim report. [Note: None of the terror bloc countries aligned with China have adopted UNDRIP.]

Kimberly Murray tells the Senate committee: “We will be in Toronto next to talk about the importance of Indigenous law and how we incorporate Indigenous law into a new legal framework.”

How many Canadians are aware that a new legal framework is being created based on UNDRIP and claims of genocide, unproven in any court anywhere in the world. A legal framework that may allow Indigenous grave diggers to access your property without a legal warrant, restrict your commercial activity on your own land, declare lands to be sacred ‘possible’ graveyards and therefore untouchable.

Kimberly Murray tells the Senate: “We need access to land. This is what keeps me awake many nights, thinking about how some things could escalate. We have landowners that aren’t allowing survivors onto properties, even to do ceremony, let alone to search the grounds. My office has had to write letters and have meetings with landowners to try to convince them that this is the right thing to do. We have landowners that have campers on top of the burials of children — known burials. We don’t have any law to put a stop to this.”

That is because, at present, we have property laws that prevent trespass. These are being eroded by historical revisionists who, even in the tragic Colten Boushie case, make the argument that Colten was not really trespassing because the land in question was part of Treaty 6. These authors claim the original signatories to Treaty 6 (or other treaties in general) did not know what they were signing or did not understand what ceding rights meant. Extensive work by Dr. Hugh Dempsey in his books and articles, much of it drawn from interviews with elders, some of whom were of the era of Treaty 7, or who were direct descendants, show that the chiefs of the time were very competent in negotiations and knew what they were signing. The Chiefs also knew that the alternative would be for the murderous Indian Wars from the US to spill over the border without some arrangement for Crown protection for their people.

Probably the biggest surprise (and a great relief) in the Senate testimony by Kimberly Murray, is the fact that anyone wanting to trace their Indigenous relatives can go on Ancestry.com and find out all the details available. (No, this is not a sponsored op-ed.)

Kimberly Murray states: “I’m going to give you an example. This keeps happening. The family doesn’t know where their loved one is buried. They were taken to a sanatorium, an Indian residential school. They were just told — and I know Senator Audette knows this all too well in Quebec — that they died. I can get the name of that individual, I can log into the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, find the name of the student, find a record, which will lead me down to another record, which will lead me to ancestry.com. Why are families having to go to my office to find the death certificate of their loved one on ancestry.com when the provinces and territories won’t just provide those records?”

“And then those records will lead you to where they’re buried, hundreds of miles away from their home community. We are now seeing families going to cemeteries. I get this a lot. The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried. Every Indigenous family needs to know where their child is buried. When we find that and we know that they’re going to have a little bit closure now, they know the truth and they have some answers, that’s what keeps us going.”

So, “the children aren’t missing; they’re buried in cemeteries.”

And “They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried.”

Wow! What a revelation!

Instead of granting millions of dollars to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, it looks like we could just give one member of an Indigenous family a ~$50 starter subscription to Ancestry.com and call it a day. No need for empire building of a multi-million dollar Indigenous-equivalent “Holocaust” edifice at the University of Manitoba, the holder of the trust deed for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. No need to bring in the Guatemalan forensic experts on Indigenous-led exhumations. No need for Calí Tzay to further decimate Canada’s reputation on the international stage.

And though the thrust of the entire Special Interlocutor’s mission is said to be to ‘bring the children home’ — in some cases, even close family really are not that keen on the idea. Witness the story of Jonnish Saganash who died of rheumatic fever during his attendance at Bishop Horden School. Through an amazing series of coincidences his sister subsequently found both the cause of his death and his burial site. But his own mother, though she cried, was not interested in repatriating his remains, nor visiting the gravesite.

The Senate testimony is deeply concerning to me, in that it appears this search for bodies and graves is trying to upend Canadian property laws and provincial resource rights laws without the public noticing.

Kimberly Murray tells the Senate: “Now we have “little brother” — the provincial governments — insisting in Saskatchewan and Alberta, for example, that they have sovereignty over the lands and resources. We have difficulty enough as it is accessing lands where Indigenous children are buried under the presumed sovereignty of the little brother provincial governments. They weren’t party to treaties, yet they are insisting that they will have a piece of this. How do we resist that? I think the federal government has an obligation to step in and acknowledge their obligations and actually prove that this is an important relationship.”

Indeed, the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan do have sovereignty over lands and resources under federal law. Today. Perhaps the Indigenous gravediggers will overturn those laws, based on unproven claims of genocide, and unmarked graves that can be found on Ancestry.com.

For the most part, Canadians are compassionate people and well aware that many children did suffer at Indian Residential Schools. This is why we are prepared to pay out some $60 billion in compensation. (Did you know the tab was that high? I bet you did not.)

On the other hand, Indian Residential Schools were also the social and medical services hubs of the day, taking in what historian Robert Carney explained: “…in some cases well into the twentieth century, took in sick, dying, abandoned, orphaned, physically and mentally handicapped children, from newborns to late adolescents, as well as adults who asked for refuge and other forms of assistance.”

Oh. That significantly changes the story. So, priests and nuns and ministers were not all engaged in nefarious activities but were actually helping the least able of society to survive, by taking them in to Indian Residential Schools out of sheer compassion and charity. No wonder sometimes the food rations were slim — taking in unexpected guests, local medical emergencies, or orphans in need would necessarily water down the food servings, especially when some remote schools had to order in staples only once a year, to be delivered in bulk and based on expected student registrations.

But no one at the Senate or the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation wants to hear this kind of context. That is in their report Recommendation 6. “That the Government of Canada take every action necessary to combat the rise of residential school denialism.”

This recommendation was part of Kimberly Murray’s interim report and both Ministers Marc Miller and Minister of Justice ad Attorney General Lametti have made public comments in support of considering this. NDP MP Leah Gazan wants ‘residential school denialism’ — like all the facts in this article — to be legislated against as ‘hate speech’ with criminal penalties.

It is here that the Senators — supposedly part of the ‘chamber of sober second thought’ could have stepped in and mollified the situation by referring the public to the Charter Right of Freedom of Expression, Sec. 2 b) “(b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” The Senators could have noted that presenting historical facts is not an act of hatred, but one of enlightenment, and to be encouraged.

But no. The push to create criminal penalties for questioning the unproven claims of residential school genocide has now resulted in a number of on-line ‘vigilante historians’ (I guess that is a suitable name) who threaten to follow, intimidate and invade the living rooms of those who ‘target our elders.’

In fact, it was my understanding that common to many Aboriginal groups the “seven traditional values of the Ojibway, or Anishnabe, are wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility and truth.” If this is so, how can anyone threaten another who is bravely seeking the truth through honest efforts to bring historical facts to light? Why would any Indigenous person want to turn Canada into the gulag archipelago? We must all seek the truth. As Solzhenitsyn warned us “Live not by lies!”

It is strange to say, but it seems that once the Canadian Human Rights Museum was established in Winnipeg, there has been a copycat desire from Indigenous activists to have an edifice to represent their suffering — their suffering — not their history.

Much of the Plains Peoples’ history is already very well represented in Calgary at the Glenbow Museum, in displays that are filled with life and celebration of how the true ‘survivors’ lived on the Plains. Also, at the Royal Alberta Museum.

Or at the extraordinary Head-Smashed-In-Buffalo-Jump where the tools of ancestors which were used as recently as 200 years ago — which may still be used today in various hunts — can be seen and often live demonstrations can be given of how the tools were used, and how these clever people managed to live and mostly live well on vast expanses of the open prairie. I did documentary work there in the 1980’s before it was declared a UNESCO site and can say it is a powerful, spiritual place. Again. Filled with LIFE.

None of these museum exhibits or edifices are focused on death.

Most disturbing to me, as a former career and employment counsellor who worked with Aboriginal youth, is Kimberly Murray’s focus in the Senate testimony on training Indigenous people in grave search techniques. “We do not have the expertise in Canada to keep up with the demand. We need to train Indigenous people. We need to work with our Indigenous technical institutes to get our people trained in this area.”

Indigenous people are a 1.8 million population in Canada. Many First Nations bands have populations of less than 1,000 people. Do you really want your youth to focus on learning what is effectively grave digging when this is literally a dead-end career? Especially because Ancestry.com seems to have done most of the work?

For all the faults of Indian Residential Schools, they graduated hundreds of empowered, capable, skilled Indigenous people who found career paths in leadership, law, medicine, agriculture, health care, the skilled trades, the arts and entrepreneurship, many of whom became the Indigenous leaders of today, Chief Wilton Littlechild being one obvious example. Those who had positive experiences at Indian Residential Schools but never reached any level of public fame dare not speak up about it today or be subject to cancel culture. Retribution for wrong think on some reserves can be fatal. This means the entire country of Canada is being driven by a dead-end politicization of history and false claims of genocide.

For Canada’s Indigenous people to survive, choose life. Not graves and death. Get an Ancestry.com membership; honor your ancestors respectfully. By creating a new and vibrant, healthy Indigenous society. Finding graves will not do that. Finding purpose in life will.

Look to the future. Chief Crowfoot did. Chief Red Crow did.

And, since I have the ‘talking stick’ — be clear that everyone should have a voice. No one should be silenced by censorship. Uncomfortable truths are often the pathway to freedom. Freedom from misperceptions, like ghostly figures of a smoky campfire, shapeshifting shadows that vanish at sunrise.

I am now an elder. Carrying forward the knowledge I learned from Potai’na — Dr. Hugh Dempsey — and the hundreds of pioneers and historians I interviewed in the 1980s.

Listen to me too.

Michelle Stirling is a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists. She researched, wrote, and co-produced historical shows about Southern Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Hugh Dempsey, then curator of the Glenbow Museum.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author read, Rare Earth Minerals War Without Rules in Canada

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