Should Leah Gazan be the first person to be criminally charged under her private member's Bill C-413?
Should Leah Gazan be the first person to be criminally charged under her private member's Bill C-413?
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By Nina Green
On 31 October 2024 Member of Parliament Leah Gazan called a press conference to lobby for Bill C-413, her private member's bill designed to criminalize her fellow citizens for disagreeing with her views.
Gazan led off the press conference with this statement:
Good morning, everybody. I'm Leah Gazan, and I'm the Member of Parliament from Winnipeg Centre, and we're here to discuss support of Bill C-413 to amend the Criminal Code to include the willful promotion of hate against Indigenous peoples by condoning, downplaying, justifying the residential schools.
To evoke an emotional response, Gazan used the word 'violence' a dozen times during her press conference, falsely equating speech with violence, although violence by definition involves physical force.
Gazan's bill is obviously not aimed at preventing physical violence against Indigenous people. It is aimed at preventing her fellow Canadians from saying anything positive about Indian residential schools.
Earlier, on 27 September 2024, Gazan made the bill personal, telling CTV News that 'my family has been impacted by residential school', implying that she had been motivated to introduce her bill because of the serious harm residential schools had inflicted on her own family.
In fact, the exact opposite is true. Residential schools had a positive effect on Leah Gazan's family.
On her father's side, Gazan is Jewish, and her maternal grandfather was Chinese. Thus her only possible connection to Indian residential schools is through her maternal grandmother, Adeline LeCaine, the daughter of Leah Gazan's great-grandfather, John LeCaine (1890-1964).
What we learn about John LeCaine turns out to be surprising. He was the son of a white North West Mounted Police officer, William Edward Archibald LeCain (1859-1915), and Emma Loves War, whose Lakota Sioux family sought refuge in Canada with Chief Sitting Bull and 5000 of his people after the massacre of Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. See Carter, p. 33.
Since he had a white father and an American Indian mother, John LeCaine was, in the terminology of the day, a half-breed, and ineligible to attend a residential school since federally-funded Indian residential schools were reserved for status Indians under the Indian Act. However an exception was made, and both John LeCaine and his sister Alice LeCaine (1888-1976) were admitted to the Regina Industrial School. John LeCaine attended for seven years, from 1899 to 1906 when he was 9 to 16 years of age. While there he learned to read and write English proficiently, and mastered agricultural and carpentry skills which equipped him to apply, like white settlers at the time, for a homestead, which he proved up in 1913. In 1914 he wrote to the Department of the Interior asking for a ruling on whether his two half-brothers - who were full-blooded Sioux - could also apply for homesteads.
The proficiency in English he acquired at the Regina Industrial School enabled John LeCaine to became a writer and a historian of the Lakota people. In later years he mapped the places he and his stepfather, Okute Sica, had visited on a journey to the Frenchman River in 1910, and wrote a collection of stories told to him by Sioux Elders, Reflections of the Sioux World, as well as other articles, including some published in the Oblate journal, The Indian Record.
Although the Regina Industrial School was a Presbyterian-run institution, at some point John LeCaine became a Roman Catholic. According to his obituary, he organized the building of a beautiful Catholic chapel on the Wood Mountain Reserve, and was buried from that chapel in 1964. He also gave instruction in the Catholic faith to Indigenous elders. From his obituary in the 20 March 1964 issue of the Regina Leader-Post:
[LeCaine] assisted the Saskatchewan Historical Society in locating the first few miles of the trail that linked Wood Mountain with Fort Walsh in the early days of the NWMP. Part of the trail passed over his own land.
The tiny, but beautiful chapel where his funeral Mass was said, stands near this old trail and just 1 1/2 miles northeast of his home. It was built in 1946 by Rev. G. Laviolette, OMI, when Mr. LeCaine organized his friends and neighbors to help with financing and building the chapel.
He assisted the visiting Catholic missionaries on numerous occasions giving instruction in the faith to elder Indians who were later baptized.
According to his obituary, Leah Gazan's great-grandfather, John LeCaine, married three times. His second wife was Helene Tawiyaka of the Standing Buffalo Reserve near Fort Qu' Appelle. Helene was the daughter of Martha Tawiyaka who attended the Qu'Appelle Industrial School for twelve years, and at the age of 88 recounted her positive experience. From the June 1991 issue of the Home Mission magazine:
Anthropologist James H. Howard recorded Martha Tawiyaka, aged 88 in 1972, in his The Canadian Sioux as saying: "I went to school at Lebret when I was seven. I stayed there twelve years. I like it there with the sisters. One time they took me with them to Winnipeg to a religious retreat. No one was allowed to speak. I liked it. I decided that I wanted to be a Grey Nun, but my father came and took me out of the school when he heard of this." Martha Tawiyaka also noted she could speak Cree and French as well as Sioux. She learned French from the Grey Nuns and Cree from the Cree girls at Lebret School.
Perhaps encouraged by his mother-in-law, Martha Tawiyaka, and by his own positive residential school experience, in 1930 John LeCaine tried to send his daughter Stella LeCaine (Martha's granddaughter) to the same residential school Martha had attended - the Lebret/Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School. However as a half-breed, a homesteader who did not live on a reserve, and a voter like other Canadians, he was found ineligible to have his children educated at a federally-funded Indian residential school. His daughter Stella, who had been admitted provisionally by the school principal on 1 January 1930, was discharged three months later on the basis of a letter written to Duncan Campbell Scott on 7 March 1930 by the Indian Commissioner, W.M. Graham. Graham recommended that Scott refuse admission to Stella and several other children from the Wood Mountain Reserve whose parents wanted them to attend. Graham wrote:
You are aware that at one time (about 15 years ago) nearly half the children in this school were halfbreeds. We succeeded in getting every one of them out, and made it a hard and fast rule that the only halfbreed children who could be admitted were those who were living on an Indian reserve as Indians.
The parents of every one of these children are voters, and when the children become of age they will have the right to vote. They are not a charge on the Federal Government at all, and if they are to be sent to school the expense should be borne by the Provincial Government. . . .
I would ask for your authority to have these children returned to their parents.
The document showing Stella LeCaine's discharge states that some of the other children who were being discharged had formerly attended the day school at Wood Mountain. It thus appears that John LeCaine preferred residential school to day school; he wanted to send his daughter more than 300 kilometres from home to the Indian residential school at Lebret/Qu'Appelle when she could have attended a day school at home in Wood Mountain.
Although John LeCaine was deemed ineligible to send his daughter to residential school, the Department of Indian Affairs was willing to bend the rules in cases of family hardship. John LeCaine's half-brother Walter's four children were admitted to the Lebret/Qu'Appelle residential school in 1930 on charitable grounds because their mother was too ill to care for them. See images 238-250 at:
FILE HILLS QU'APPELLE AGENCY - QU'APPELLE RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL - ADMISSIONS - DISCHARGES
In summary, everything in Leah Gazan's family history concerning Indian residential schools was positive. Her great-grandfather, John LeCaine, lived a successful life because of the education and training he received at residential school, and wanted his children to attend residential school. His mother-in-law, Martha Tawiyaka, liked residential school so much that she wanted to become a nun like her teachers. His brother Walter's children were admitted to a residential school to help the family when Walter's wife was ill, even though they were ineligible to attend.
If Leah Gazan were to speak or write about these facts concerning her own family's positive experience with residential schools, and thereby 'condone, downplay, and justify residential schools', could she be criminally charged under her own private member's bill, Bill C-413?
Of course she could. That's what her bill is designed to do to any other Canadian who says anything positive about residential schools.
Why is Leah Gazan trying to criminalize those who have positive things to say about residential schools? Is it because she doesn't know her own family history which establishes that some children had positive experiences at Indian residential schools?
She should withdraw the bill, and apologize to Canadians for introducing it.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Is Mark Kersten planning to sue the Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, for crimes against humanity?
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There is nothing like someone who really knows how to do historical research to debunk some of this nonsense. Thank you, Nina Green.
A well researched article. The ideologues are digging their holes deeper all the time. The recent US election may be a harbinger of the backlash that may happen here. I'm not happy about this, we need a reasoned, not an emotional approach, but politicians like Gazan fuel reaction with their extreme positions.