Should We Believe Survivors?

When records contradict stories

Alberni Residential School - The Children Remembered

By Nina Green

Can Canadians believe Survivors without independent verification?

That's a very important question for all of us.

Let's look at one of the very first Survivor stories to receive national attention through Kevin Annett (who later influenced Jim Prentice through Member of Parliament Gary Merasty).

In 1995, Harriet Nahanee, then 60 years old, told Karen Gram of the Vancouver Sun that when she was eleven, she had witnessed the principal of the Alberni Indian Residential School, the Reverend Albert Caldwell, kick a 6-year-old student down the stairs to her death.  See attached article from the Vancouver Sun.

Three years later, in 1998, Harriet Nahanne told attendees at a Simon Fraser University campus event in downtown Vancouver that the murdered student's name was Maisie Shaw.

For thirty years, the story of Maisie Shaw's heartless murder has been publicized by Harriet Nahanne, Kevin Annett and others, and most recently on 13 June 2021 by journalist Stephen Hume, who recounted this version shortly after the false claim by the Kamloops Band that it had discovered 'the remains of 215 children':

[Maisie Shaw's] mother died when she was five. And then she went to the Alberni school.

What happened to her there is the mystery. Another former student, Harriet Nahanee, who died in 2007, said in 1995 that on December 24, 1946, when she was six, she had witnessed Maisie Shaw being kicked down a flight of stairs at the residential school and lying motionless on the floor with her eyes open and that she later died of her injuries; her body was sent back to Nitinat. [bolding added]

The problem?

None of the so-called 'facts' are correct.  Maisie Shaw did not go to the Alberni Indian Residential School at the age of five when her mother died in 1937.  School records show that she had been there six years when she died in 1946, and thus did not enrol until 1940, when she was eight.

Moreover Harriet Nahanne, born Harriet Jones in 1935, was eleven years old in 1946, not six years old, and Maisie Shaw's BC death certificate states that Maisie Shaw was fourteen years old when she died, not six years old.  Thus Harriet Nahanne bizarrely told the Vancouver Sun in 1995 that she had witnessed the murder of a six-year-old when in fact Maisie Shaw was fourteen at the time of her death.

Even more importantly, on 24 December 1946, when Harriet Nahanne says she witnessed Maisie Shaw being murdered at the Alberni Indian Residential School, Maisie Shaw was actually in the West Coast General Hospital, where she had been under the care of Dr N.J. Jones since 18 December.  See her death certificate, signed by both Dr Jones and the Indian Agent, N.W. Garrard, which states that she died in the West Coast General Hospital on 26 December 1946 of acute rheumatic pericarditis after 8 days in the hospital.

The tale told by Harriet Nahanne of Maisie Shaw's death, and repeated by Kevin Annett and others, is thus false in every respect.

This raises the obvious question: Can Canadians believe Survivors without subjecting their tales to independent verification?

They cannot.  Survivors' stories need to be independently verified.

Nor should Canadians put any credence in the University of Manitoba's NCTR website, which lists Maisie Shaw among thousands of missing children who are not actually missing.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The Unknown Truth Of Canada's Residential School System and read about Nina Green’s website which features hundreds of Indian Residential School records.

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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