The Dividing Lie

Residential school Denialism And The Pope's Canadian Apology Tour

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani on Unsplash

By Michael Melanson

In the flurry of columns focusing on Pope Francis' apology tour, Winnipeg Free Press columnist Tom Brodbeck may have distinguished himself, not by criticizing the choreographed contrition nor by extolling this new step on the endless journey to Reconciliation, but by gloating. The title says it all: “Papal apology closes door on residential school denialists.”

Clearly attempting to evoke the opprobrium associated with Holocaust denial, Brodbeck doesn't explicitly define a residential school denialist as someone who denies that the Indian Residential Schools were a genocide. He slaloms through several chicanes before finally making the direct insinuation.

Brodbeck first explains that a residential school denialist is someone who rationalizes the schools as “an earnest attempt by government and churches to provide Indigenous children with an education to prepare them for the modern world.” Government was much smaller than it is now and not at all as disposed to deficit spending as its current iteration; the schools had to manage with tight budgets.  Education was a treaty obligation and it was considered progressive at the time to teach Aboriginal children ways of supporting themselves. To not educate Indian children would mean leaving them to slowly perish in certain penury.

Brodbeck believes residential schools were not designed to provide Indigenous children with an education; “If they were, the schools would have been properly funded and staffed with experienced teachers (like public schools for non-Indigenous children).“

Brodbeck forgets that those ordinary public schools were under provincial jurisdiction and funding was raised by taxation. Public schools in the cities might look impressive compared to some of the wooden residential schools but a lot of Manitoban children attended wooden one-room schools, a few of which still stand. Many residential schools, like the Assiniboine Residential School in my neighborhood, were massive brick and stone buildings that struck an imposing presence.

Brodbeck goes on: “They were, for the most part, run more like prisons — in largely dilapidated buildings where Indigenous children were malnourished, neglected, and often physically and sexually abused.” I've never heard of a prison that let its captives go home for Christmas holidays and summer recess. Brodbeck makes it sound as if malnutrition and neglect were general conditions but is that the case? For that to be the case it would mean that the caring and kindness one might expect of a nun would be the exception and that most nuns were racist psychopaths with a penchant for tormenting children.

Physical and sexual abuse happened. And still does. Predators infiltrated institutions to prey on the vulnerable then as now nor was all the abuse inflicted by just the staff. Student-on-student abuse occurred as well. Again, was abuse a general experience? The Truth and Reconciliation Commission gives the impression that it was a common experience for students but only about 6,000 former students testified. The total student population over all the years is generally stated as 150,00. In any one year, there would usually be less than 10,000 students in attendance throughout Canada. Are the testimonies of 6,000 self-selected former students a fair indication of what was the general experience?

“Pope Francis cleared up another falsehood denialists are fond of spreading: because some Indigenous children, in rare cases, had positive experiences at residential schools, and because some Indigenous families voluntarily enrolled their kids in them, the institutions couldn’t have been that bad.”

How rare are those positive experiences? How many parents registered their children for attendance?  If the schools were so often recognized as evil, why didn’t any Indian band council take them over as was the case in the last years of the IRS?

“Euro-Canadians believed their culture, language and race was superior.”

Whoever Brodbeck means exactly in that hyphenated slurry of humanity, some probably did think their kind was superior. It's easy to imagine why because what exactly in a Paleolithic culture compares with things like literacy, civil administration, the rule of law, engineering, etc.?

“The Pope reminded Canadians even if the schools had some redeeming qualities, they were overshadowed by the overarching goal of cultural genocide.”

The Pope didn't mention 'genocide', either the real or rhetorical kind. For the goal of the IRS to be cultural genocide and overarching, such a directive would have to be issued from a central authority and a fairly sinister one at that. The Catholic orders that ran the schools did so in a highly decentralized manner insofar as the Vatican was concerned. Such a goal would permit no use or encouragement of any native languages but the practical necessity of just running the school required some communication in native languages. The Cree alphabet in use today was created by priests at one of the schools. And considering that only about one third of aboriginal children alive at any one time attended the schools, it's a rather odd strategy of eradicating Indigenous language and culture

Having broached the subject of genocide, albeit the equivocal genocide of culture, Brodbeck reaches for the heart of darkness: “Still, the Pope’s apology, in front of Indigenous people on their territory, acknowledging many Christians from the Catholic Church participated in the genocidal policy, was unique. “

The Pope didn't acknowledge Catholics or any other Christians participated in genocidal polices at the IRS. Am I a denialist for pointing out that Brodbeck is putting words in the Pope's mouth?

Why does Brodbeck want to falsely accuse Canada and the Church of committing genocide? I doubt Brodbeck thinks he is making false accusations but the case for genocide has only been made in the court of public opinion and even then with a jealous policing of who gets to say what in defense of Canada and the Church. For one, seeing aboriginal people as victims of genocide, even generations after the last of the church-run schools closed, allows him to live with his low expectations of aboriginal people. What more can one expect of a survivor or someone afflicted with intergenerational trauma? For another, Brodbeck can derive a sense of moral righteousness and superiority. For him, it's like getting to sneer at a legion of David Irvings except he's no Deborah Lipstadt and this was no genocide.

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