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By Nina Green
Why is the federal government trying to prevent Canadians from learning the truth about Indian residential schools?
On 24 September 2026, six days before Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty issued a statement about so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’.
Alty claims so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ ‘spreads false information by denying or casting doubt on the history of Residential Schools and the lasting harm they caused’. She offers no examples, which strongly suggests she could not provide examples if pressed to do so. The federal government is thus using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack a straw man of its own creation.
In fact, the federal government has gone far beyond using Canadian taxpayer funds to attack the straw man it calls ‘Residential Schools denialism’. It has even entertained bills which would criminalize it.
The federal government refuses to release residential school attendance records to the public which would disprove claims of missing children
In addition to using Canadian taxpayer money to attack so-called ‘Residential Schools denialism’ - a straw man of its own creation - and entertaining bills which would criminalize it, the federal government has actively prevented the truth about Canada’s Indian residential schools from coming out.
For years there have been tales of thousands of missing Indian residential school students. The federal government has allowed these baseless rumours to proliferate, despite the fact that not a single name of a missing Indian residential school student has ever been produced by anyone, including the federal government.
Moreover the federal government has allowed these baseless tales of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate while actively concealing from the Canadian public the attendance records in its possession which disprove them.
An example is the attendance records for the Kamloops Indian Residential School. A close examination of the quarterly returns for the Kamloops Indian Residential School from 1943-1952, which are available online, establishes that every student is accounted for during that decade.
The government also has quarterly returns and other attendance records for the remaining years of the existence of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1952-1977, which it has not released to the public. Their existence is attested to by the federal government itself in the school narrative it prepared for use in the Independent Assessment Process (see attachment).
Quarterly returns were the basis on which the Department of Indian Affairs calculated the per capita grant which covered the operating costs of the school. School officials ensured they were meticulously accurate in order to obtain as large a grant as possible based on current student enrolment, and the Department of Indian Affairs likewise demanded that they be meticulously accurate to avoid the federal government overpaying the school.
It is thus of the greatest significance that on pp. 7-8 of the attached school narrative, the federal government provides a table of total attendance figures for the years of the Kamloops Indian Residential School’s existence. The figures given by the federal government for the years from 1952-1977 are not estimates. They are very precise numbers - 402, 424, 381, 390, for example — indicating that they are derived from attendance records in the federal government’s possession, and in fact the federal government’s heading on the table reads ‘most are September figures for each year and based on Quarterly Returns where possible‘.
It is thus clear that if released by the federal government, the quarterly returns underlying the figures in this table would establish conclusively that not a single student from the Kamloops Indian Residential School went missing between the years 1952-1977, yet the federal government refuses to release these attendance records so that the Canadian public can learn the truth. Instead, the federal government allows the damaging and completely unfounded myth of thousands of missing Indian residential school students to proliferate, and even to be promulgated beyond Canada’s borders (as, for example, in the recent hearings of the Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal).
The federal government needs to release these attendance records, not just for the Kamloops Indian Residential School, but for all Indian residential schools in Canada, so that the Canadian public can learn the truth, i.e., that federal government records establish that not a single student is missing from an Indian residential school.
A recent publication furthers the straw man of ‘Residential Schools denialism’
This September saw the release of the University of Manitoba Press’s Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism, edited by Sean Carleton of the University of Manitoba and Niigaan Sinclair, son of the late Chairman of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), Murray Sinclair. The book includes a chapter by Andrew Woolford of the University of Manitoba, one of the ‘judges’ at the aforementioned Rome-based Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal hearings, a conflict of interest if there ever was one.
The book is replete with factual errors. Because of space constraints, only two will be highlighted here.
Michelle Good’s egregious misinterpretation of a statement made by Samuel Hume Blake, and her erroneous attribution of it to Dr Peter Bryce
The egregious misinterpretation of Samuel Hume Blake’s statement was dealt with earlier in relation to the Globe and Mail’s admission that it had failed the Canadian public in its reporting on the Kamloops Band’s claim to have found ‘the remains of 215 children’ at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021. As explained earlier, in the course of its apology to Canadians, the Globe and Mail made the egregious error of misinterpreting a statement by Samuel Hume Blake as a reference to conditions at Indian residential schools when in fact Blake was talking about conditions on Indian reserves. See the full explanation of the Globe and Mail’s error here.
In her chapter in the newly-released Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism, Michelle Good makes the same egregious error as the Globe and Mail in claiming that Blake was referring to conditions at Indian residential schools when in fact Blake was talking about conditions on Indian reserves, and Good then compounds her error by erroneously attributing the statement to Dr Peter Bryce, rather than correctly attributing it to Samuel Hume Blake.
On page 204, Good writes:
As Bryce explained, “doing nothing to obviate the preventable causes of death” in residential schools “brings the Department [of Indian Affairs] within unpleasant nearness to the charge of manslaughter.”
Dr Bryce never said those words. Samuel Hume Blake said them, and he was talking about conditions which caused rampant TB on the reserves, not, as Good mistakenly writes, conditions which caused TB in residential schools.
Good took her erroneous misrepresentation much further:
Negligence causing death is a criminal act, and the negligence in the residential schools that nurtured tuberculosis epidemics and the resulting colossal death rate among the children must no longer be dismissed with the deaths being attributed to natural causes. This negligence must be considered as reaching the level of criminality that is obvious upon careful consideration of the evidence.
In fact, if Good had actually given ‘careful consideration’ to the evidence, she would have learned, as explained here, that Dr Bryce found that TB was rampant in residential schools because almost every child arrived at residential school already infected with TB, usually in a latent form. In other words, students contracted TB on the reserves, and brought it to the schools.
Inflammatory and false statements such as Good’s resulting from faulty research harm reconciliation in ways that cannot even be calculated, yet it appears Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Rebecca Alty intends to use Canadian taxpayer funds to promote inflammatory false statements like Good’s while simultaneously suppressing the release of residential school records in the federal government’s possession which would disprove damaging myths such as the false claim that there are thousands of missing Indian residential school students (see above).
Raymond Frogner’s erroneous claim of 31 missing children
Raymond Frogner, Head Archivist for the National Centre For Truth And Reconciliation (NCTR) at the University of Manitoba makes a similar egregious error based on faulty research in his chapter in Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism.
On pp. 78-9, Frogner claims that 31 students who were listed in the quarterly return for June 1942 are absent from the quarterly return for September 1942, and that there has been no application for discharges for these ‘missing’ 31 students.
Firstly, Frogner has the wrong year. The year was 1941, not 1942.
Secondly, every single one of the 31 students was formally discharged. See the attached list of the 31 students Frogner is talking about, and the attached discharge forms from the Admission and Discharge file for St Anne’s available here.
In each case, the reason for discharge is given. Three students had reached the age at which they should be discharged. Five were sick. Eleven required rest, indicating they were not strong enough to meet the demands of classroom education. One had returned home to help her mother. Eleven had been kept at home by their parents.
The last two reasons for discharge are highly significant in terms of the endlessly-repeated myth that 150,000 children were ripped from their parents’ arms (as falsely claimed by former TRC Commissioner Marie Wilson) and forced to attend Indian residential schools. Canadians can see in these discharge forms that far from being ripped from their parents’ arms and forced to attend, students went home to help when their parents needed them, and stayed home when their parents decided not to return them to residential school.
Frogner starkly exposed the incompetence of the NCTR when he wrote further:
NCTR Archive staff have not found a resolution to these missing numbers. They have been identified at the NCTR as records of missing children that require more research. The NCTR’s Missing Children Project has identified slightly over 17,600 “indications of loss”. These are cases such as Fort Albany above, where the records of loss remain unresolved.
In an endnote, Frogner stated:
The destinies of the missing children, identified with numerical identifiers in M. Langlois’s September 1941 Quarterly Report, remain unknown.
Canadians should be stunned at Frogner’s false claim that these are ‘missing children’ whose ‘destinies remain unknown’. It took only a few hours of research in a file which is available online to refute Frogner’s claim that these 31 children are missing. They were all formally discharged (see the attached forms) and accounted for. None are missing, and in fact one of them, Gabriel Etherington, was readmitted to St Anne’s in 1942! (see attachment). Yet Frogner, who is Head Archivist at the NCTR, claims the NCTR staff ‘have not found a resolution to these missing numbers’. Clearly the NCTR and its ‘Missing Children Project’ are the problem, not the solution.
Summary
The federal government is at an obvious crossroads. It needs to decide whether it will use Canadian taxpayer funds to obscure the truth about Indian residential schools, and whether it will continue to refuse to release records which establish that there are no missing children, or whether it will actually further reconciliation by allowing the truth to come out. In short, the federal government has to decide whether it will continue to waste Canadian taxpayer funds to promulgate myths which are harmful to reconciliation, or allow the truth to come out which will promote reconciliation.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Should Connie Walker and Kimberly Murray's Indian Residential School Records Project be permanently shelved?
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l dropped off documents at the constituency office of Liberal MP peter fragiskatos inquiring among other things, what do the infamous ground radar images look like on paper? a Q l have posed elsewhere for quite some time. and have pointed out none of the many news reports related to the story even give an adequate *description* let alone the images.
what
is
the
government
hiding?
More great work, Nina! We appreciate it.