Conrad Black: Attempted cultural suicide

 This column is prompted by the refusal of the Powell River newspaper, the Powell River Peak, to publish an advertisement for a talk to be given on March 30 in Powell River by Frances Widdowson, a contributor to the excellent book “Grave Error.”

 

It was an honour to have been asked to contribute a foreword to that book, which was a carefully researched collection of learned and impartial opinions about the controversy in 2021 over the so-called unmarked graves of Indigenous children near the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

The excuse given in writing by the publisher of the Peak, Kelly Keil, on March 17 for refusing to advertise this event was that “Grave Error” “appears to centre around the denial of well-documented historical facts regarding residential schools, which contradicts the overwhelming evidence provided by survivors, historical records and independent inquiries.…

Our advertising standards require that we do not publish content that promotes misinformation or undermines established historical facts. This is not an issue of limiting free expression but rather of ensuring that our platform is not used to spread content that distorts history and may cause harm, particularly to Indigenous communities.…

We cannot in good conscience facilitate the promotion of material it denies documented historical atrocities.“

This is a scurrilous denunciation of a book authored by experts in this field, rigorously presenting the product of meticulous and impartial inquiry and analysis. It is particularly galling hypocrisy coming from the publisher of a newspaper that jubilantly published a hagiographical description of a talk given by NDP MP Leah Gazan, the mover of a parliamentary accusation against Canada of attempted genocide against our Native people.

The Kamloops children’s unmarked grave incident was reported locally and then taken up and publicized all over the world: that the corpses of 215 children who had died at a residential school had been discovered and that their deaths had not been reported and that they were surreptitiously buried in unmarked graves.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed shame and guilt on behalf of this country and ordered that Canadian government flags be lowered to half-mast and remain there for nearly six months, including on our embassies and consulates abroad.

“Grave Error” was published in 2023, edited by C.P. Champion and Thomas Flanagan, and is a collaboration between 17 people who between them are learned about all aspects of this controversy and who soberly analyze it from their different perspectives. “Grave Error” does not whitewash any wrongdoing or shortcoming, and there have been many of them, in Canada’s historic policy toward Indigenous people.

It starts from the fact that the evidence that was the basis of these allegations about unmarked graves was the detection by underground radar of “anomalies.” The people who actually conducted that research were careful to say that it was far from certain what the cause of these anomalies were: they could be the roots of trees, geological phenomena or the burial of an unlimited range of objects.

 It was outright and unsubstantiated speculation that these were graves at all, and if they were graves, there was no reason to be confident about whose graves they were.

The Government of Canada effectively identified Canada to the United Nations as a country where a form of cultural genocide, at least, had been attempted. The United Nations does not recognize cultural genocide and requires that any imputation of genocide be a reference to the attempted physical extermination of an identified group.

This is consistent with the suffix “cide,” as in homicide, suicide, fratricide, infanticide, insecticide, etc. What is meant by cultural genocide is assimilation, the ancient bugbear of French Canada and a fate that was desired by most people who emigrated to places where their native language was not spoken but where they desired to participate fully in the life of their new homeland. It is usually a positive rather than a negative or destructive process and does not normally require any abandonment of one’s original culture.

It is also true, though it is not evident from the conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report (which contains many untruths and is anything but conciliatory), but rather from the background volumes, that while the Indian Residential Schools were conducted in either English or French, there was no effort to suppress Indigenous languages or cultures.

Whatever else may have gone on in the schools, and there is no doubt that there were many outrageous and tragic incidents, the objective of them was not to brainwash away the heritage of the children but to educate them in one of the official languages in order to qualify them to participate fully in Canadian life.

Contrary to a great deal of myth-making, the majority of students were voluntarily registered by their parents as the only method to escape a life of illiteracy and poverty and to comply with the legal requirement that all Canadian children go to school. There is no support at all for the theory that Native children were routinely and cruelly ripped from the arms of their parents.

In the particular case of the Kamloops residential school, further research revealed that there was not one single unexplained death nor any that had been hidden from the parents of any children. Even in schools for prosperous families in the late 19th century and early 20th century, there were an inordinate number of deaths from tuberculosis; all of these were identified.

 It was never the practice of the Kamloops school or so far as is known, any Indian residential school, to bury anyone in unmarked graves. In the unlikely event these were graves, it is possible that the markers on them had deteriorated or even vanished. There is an authentic Native cemetery a little over a mile from the school.

Despite Parliament having devoted $27 million to verify whether the anomalies in question were in fact of children of the nearby school, there has been no effort to do so and accordingly, we have absolutely no evidence that the anomalies discovered by underground radar have anything to do with the death of Native children.

On this fragmentary basis, our government caused us officially to be placed in the same category as the Turkish authors of the massacres of Bulgarians and Armenians, the Nazi masters of the death camps and the massacres of Jews and Gypsies and millions of others, and the horrifying exterminations by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s of up to two-million Cambodians and the 1994 Rwanda Genocide of about 500,000 Tutsi.

This is a monstrous blood libel on the British and French Canadians and an unconscionable assault upon Canada’s justified reputation as a decent and civilized, though certainly imperfect, jurisdiction throughout its colonial and autonomous history.

Societies that aggressively and self-righteously condemn themselves falsely for atrocities have a moral death-wish and are attempting cultural suicide, and if there were such a thing, perhaps even cultural genocide.

Conrad Black: Attempted cultural suicide