Since the May 2021 announcement by Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir that ground-penetrating radar (GPR) technology had located the remains of 215 children on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, Canada has been embroiled in difficult attempts to come to terms with claims of mass graves, murder and genocide. 

Last month saw release of the final report from the office tasked with bringing the clarity of the law to a topic obscured by public outrage and political agendas. The report may offer more heat than light. Its conclusion, drawn by its author, Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray, is that the primary legal barrier to truth and reconciliation is “denialism” erected by those who deny “the intent, outcomes and impacts of the system.” 

But what does “denialism” actually mean?

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It’s helpful to go back to 2022 when Minister of Justice and Attorney General David Lametti appointed Murray, a lawyer and former executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as special interlocutor for unmarked graves at former residential schools. The Office for the Independent Special Interlocutor (OISI) was to be non-partisan with a $10.4 million budget. Its mandate was to identify legal barriers to the search and archival research on unmarked graves.

In a June 2022 interview with CTV News, Murray said she expected to have conversations with survivors and Indigenous leadership around legal recourse in the matter of jurisdiction over unmarked graves and suspected untimely deaths of children.

Though in Kamloops Chief Casimir would later step back from the claims about 215 bodies  — referring to the 2021 GPR findings as “anomalies” — the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) refrained from explicit comment. The bishops said they would await Murray’s findings.

At the Oct. 29-30 National Gathering when those findings were unveiled, “denialism” was front and centre. The keynote address came from NDP MP Leah Gazan. A month earlier, she had introduced Bill C-413 to add “residential school denialism” to the Criminal Code as a hate crime.

The following day, “Addressing Denialism” was one of two panel discussions scheduled on the agenda. The second was, “Enforced Disappearances and Settler Amnesty.” 

Dr. Sean Carleton, a non-Indigenous historian in the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba, was a panelist for the denialism discussion.

“Denialists understand the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s formula very clearly: first we need truth, truth will lead to healing and justice, healing and justice will lead to reconciliation,” Carleton said. “Denialists know this, and they are trying to keep us stuck in the truth part: Residential school denialism as a form of genocide denial.”

The statement, which some might consider astonishing especially from a historian, succinctly presents the dilemma posed to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians by the new Framework for Reconciliation as posited by Murray and her team.

If battling denialism is the plan for the next stage of reconciliation (minus truth), everyone needs to be on board with the definition of denialism and the means to combat it. Otherwise, Canadians are right back to 2008 with the establishment of the TRC. 

Noah MacDonald is a member of the Michipicoten First Nation and has served as a canon lawyer for the Archdiocese of Toronto for over four years. In an interview with The Catholic Register, MacDonald expressed his broad agreement with the approach of the OISI. MacDonald says denialism is a problem. 

“It’s not in the articles or the books. It’s in (website) comments sections. That is where hate is fundamentally bred,” he said.

“It’s more about the general understanding of residential school system. Denialism is to obscure the truth, to protect the status quo of guilty parties. I think there is a temptation, especially among Catholics, that when these questions resurface, for protectionism, for the guard to go up immediately.”

MacDonald is also entirely comfortable with the use of the term “genocide” to describe the history of the IRS. 

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“Indigenous Catholics are certainly not a monolith, as far as our understandings and worldviews and interpretations, but for a very large majority of us, we do accept that what took place in the (Indian) Residential School system was genocide. Being able to fundamentally recognize that this is genocide is an important place to start the conversation.”

MacDonald does not think, however, that criminalization of denialism is the right move,  at least not right now. Beyond concerns over free speech or effects on social order, he thinks it “would really create a growing animosity towards Indigenous people.”

Though MacDonald says there is a degree of consensus among Indigenous Catholics in their understanding of the IRS, some disagree.

Eight days before the OISI report was published, Fr. Cristino Bouvette, priest of the Diocese of Calgary, sat down with YouTuber and Catholic speaker Ken Yasinski, for a conversation on the “mass graves controversy.” 

Of mixed Cree, Métis and Italian heritage, Bouvette has the credentials to speak to residential school denialism. His grandmother attended the Edmonton Indian Residential School for 12 years. Chosen to act as the National Liturgical Coordinator for the visit of Pope Francis to Canada in 2022, Bouvette says he has “spent the last four years of my life and ministry completely consumed” by the question of reconciliation.

Bouvette told Yasinski: “This is something I feel very confident I can stand in the face of… the whole concept of residential school denialism. How can I deny what my grandmother lived through? Who can accuse me of denying that?”

Bouvette, in effect, lays down the gauntlet. Would Gazan seek to arrest and prosecute a person like Bouvette, of Indigenous heritage whose own grandmother spent years in the residential school system but was, in his words, “neither ‘disappeared’ nor ‘genocided’ ”?

Though Bouvette’s remarks were published in advance of the panel discussion in which Carleton spoke, they are spoken by someone of Indigenous heritage to a non-Indigenous academic with professional commitments to a colonialist-settler worldview.

“Asking questions isn’t denying anything,” said Bouvette. “If we are not seeking the truth, if we are not trying to understand all of what surrounds what’s happened here, we will never get anywhere. What’s the point of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission if we leave the truth off? You can’t have reconciliation without truth.”

Some see broader historical and cultural concerns with the language as applied to the Canadian situation. 

Barbara Kay, columnist for the National Post, is concerned with the appropriation of the language of the Holocaust, specifically denialism, for the Indian Residential Schools. Kay noted denialism in reference to the Holocaust means denying “that the records are correct, that the proofs are proof, that the pictures and the photographs are true.”

Denialism, when it comes to the IRS, seems to mean something different, Kay says: “You can’t compare denialism of evidence to denialism of a thought or a belief.”

Apart from a common definition of denialism, there is also the question, as posed by MacDonald, about the wisdom and legality of making residential school denialism a crime. The history of Holocaust denialism might prove instructional.

In a series of 2007 interviews, when the European Union was debating denialism being made criminal, Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt said she was fundamentally opposed to denial laws.

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“I’m opposed to Holocaust denial laws for three reasons,” said the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. “I believe in free speech. Governments should make no laws limiting free speech, because it is never good when that happens. These laws turn Holocaust deniers into martyrs. Most importantly, they suggest we don’t have the history, the documentation, the evidence to make the case for the Holocaust having happened. They suggest we don’t trust the truth. But we do have the evidence, and we should keep on developing it and deepening it, and we should trust it.”

Lipstadt counseled that “politicians should not be doing history. They have a hard enough time doing politics and legislation right. Let them not muck up history, too.”