Indian Residential Schools Revisited, Winnipeg, MB (2024)

01/24/2022

Excavating the Kamloops Burials, Part 3

Hymie Rubenstein
Jan 17

The following piece is the third part of the three-part draft essay about the alleged mass burial of students who attended the Kamloops Indian Residential school that I sent to C2C Journal for publication. It was accepted after several revisions as a substantially reduced two-part essay titled Digging for the Truth about Canada’s Residential School Graves that has already been linked to below.

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Excavating the Kamloops Burials

Part 3: The Explanation

My “knowing” about the burials at the Kamloops IRS is not confined to setting the record straight about what was a poorly funded, often mismanaged boarding school project whose goals nevertheless paralleled those of public education for the masses between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Nor is it sufficient to simply mock fake news and journalistic laziness or debunk Indigenous activist falsehoods about the graveyard at Kamloops that exhibit possible unethical and libellous conduct and a Canadian version of “the N**i Big Lie.” All are low-hanging fruit easily proven to be rotten to the core.

My overarching position is that identity politics, critical race theory, a sentimental sympathy for downtrodden people, the romanticization of an Aboriginal past that never existed, the privileging of Indigenous storytelling over the Western scientific paradigm, Indian Industry avarice, and what I call “Indigenous exceptionalism” have been intertwined to produce an outpouring of factually groundless outrage and grief where none was deserved apart from stating that the death of children is always tragic. Rather, I suggest that the extravagant focus on these burials has diverted attention from the more fundamental exclusionary-cum-privileged place of Aboriginal people in Canadian society, a status that has had the highly predictable consequence of making them worse off than they would otherwise be.

Since the first six sources of the moral panic-cum-witch hunting now on display have been variously applied ad nauseam for several years to many closely or superficially similar events and their aftermath, whether peaceful or violent, most dramatically the police killing of Floyd George in Minneapolis in 2020, my focus is to dig deeply into Indigenous exceptionalism, an unnamed but readily identified phenomenon that has been around since 1763 in what became Canada.

Exceptionalism is a term that overlaps somewhat with ethnocentrism, a well-known sociological concept that means evaluating and judging another culture, often negatively, based on how it compares to one’s own culture. When ethnic or racial groups employ exceptionalism, they go much further than this by claiming unique superiority to bolster a cause they strongly support.

In ideologically driven movements, a group may assert exceptionalism, with or without using synonyms for the term, to exaggerate the appearance of difference justifying an unconstrained latitude of action while simultaneously denying recognition of similarities to other groups that would reduce the strength of their grievances. Indeed, the claim of exceptionalism may be so strong that group members will argue that they deserve special treatment, differential privileges, or more respect simply because of their alleged exceptionalism even if it has resulted in their underdog standing, a position often supported by non-group members suffering from xenocentrism -- the belief that another culture is superior to one’s own -- thereby strengthening their claims. The most dramatic example of this self-loathing in response to the Kamloops discovery has been the toppling and defacement of statues by non-Aboriginals across the country.

It is not hard to find endogenous expressions of Indigenous exceptionalism. The Aboriginal Garden of Eden creation story is the five-volume, 4,000-page 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RRCAP) whose many evidentiary shortcomings include giving preference to unverifiable oral history over well-documented written accounts; making no mention of periodic pre-contact hunger, starvation, or famine; only fleetingly referring to “violent death and cannibalism;” downplaying chronic inter-tribal warfare across the country; and burying pervasive West coast pre-contact slavery in a one-sentence footnote.

Conversely, the RRCAP deals extensively with similar activities, some now viewed as crimes against humanity, when they were perpetrated by European societies, regardless of their relevance to Canada. This partial and selective story is well on its way to becoming our country’s “official history.”

One of the RRCAP’s disciples is Niigaan Sinclair, an Anishinaabe native studies professor at the University of Manitoba and son of former Senator Murray Sinclair, who has asserted that the economic, social, and political structures of pre-contact Aboriginal cultures were not only fundamentally different from but uniquely superior to those of the European colonists. So grander that Sinclair contends that those structures must replace western civilization to “save the world.”

As in other claims of ethnic or racial supremacy, missing in his analysis is any reference to features many would consider either negative or widely shared with other human groups,none of which concern Professor Sinclair though they are well recorded in the anthropological literature. Instead, he recommends the world look to Aboriginal history for guidance on how to reduce modern inter-state and inter-cultural violence: “Indigenous nations have answers to nearly every single challenge facing nation-states and leading to such wars today.”

The latest iteration of this Aboriginal mythology comes from Kevin Deer, a teacher at the Karihwanoron Mohawk Immersion School in Kahnawake and a Longhouse Faith Keeper, who, at a June 21 IRS commemoration ceremony at McGill University, proclaimed, “all of our sacred songs, our dances, our rituals and our speeches are all about the continuance of life…. Imagine if the whole world understood this Indigenous wisdom and knowledge that I’m sharing with you right now. There would be no more war, there would be no more r**e, there would be no more killing, there would be no more destruction of the natural world because people would understand that this is their Mother…. So that when those unborn generations come they will inherit a happy, safe, clean, beautiful, loving, peaceful home. That’s our responsibility to them.”

In his address, Mr. Deer conveniently failed to mention that his Mohawk ancestors, as part of the Iroquois Confederacy, engaged in the genocidal near-total annihilation of their traditional Huron enemies between 1647 and 1649.

Where do such ideas of Indigenous exceptionalism come from and how have they been nurtured?

Very briefly, although the members of most distinct cultures almost instinctively believe that their way of life is somehow exceptional, Canada’s Indigenous exceptionalism has been nurtured and amplified by declarations exogenous to the group. The first of these was the British Royal Proclamation of 1763. A nearly unique document in the long history of global conquest and colonial rule, the Proclamation established the legal framework and special relationship between the Crown and Aboriginal people that continues to this day. It did so by recognizing certain lands as unceded territories that were “reserved” for “Nations or Tribes of Indians” while simultaneously declaring that those areas were “Parts of Our Dominions and Territories.” This provision underscored that Indigenous people were still considered subjects of the Crown (although many Aboriginal people believe otherwise). The Proclamation and its somewhat vague “citizens plus” edict was gradually fleshed out by the special and inalienable rights, status, and privileges granted in the signed Indian treaties now numbering 95, reinforced by the Indian Act of 1876, amended many times since then. This was solidified by the bullet-proof inclusion of Aboriginal and treaty rights in Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution Act by allowing its exemption from the “notwithstanding clause” applying to the rights of all other Canadians. These rights further enhanced on June 21 with Royal Assent given to Bill C-15, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act, could allow Indigenous vetoes over critical natural-resource projects.

There is no other historical example of colonized races or ethnicities whose Indigenous people are privileged and centred in all these ways. Compared to America, for example, Canada’s treatment of its first settlers has been positively benign: unlike America, Canada did not engage in Indian Wars of conquest (the brief 1885 North-West Rebellion lead by Métis leader Louis Riel was opposed by most Aboriginal tribes); nor was there any United States-style ethnic cleansing of its founding settlers by forcibly transferring them from their ancestral homelands to distant territories based on a federal policy of “Indian Removal.” Warts and all, there is hardly a country, including New Zealand, that has ever done more to ensure the protection and well-being of its Indigenous people.

Still, the fly in the ointment has always been that the treaties surrendered both the traditional areas (“ceded lands”) and the sovereignty of their occupants – claims also disputed by many activists -- albeit in return for material benefits, communal use of the lands granted to them, and a special kind of Canadian citizenship.

In turn, the apartheid-like Indian Act that ordered the creation of the IRS and which continues to minutely define the rights of Indigenous people with “Indian Status” is still supported by many, perhaps most, Aboriginals who fear that its removal would obliterate their special status and differential privileges.

This fear is justified. When former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proposed doing just this in his controversial White Paper (“Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969”), the outcry from Indigenous leaders and activists was thunderous. The status quo has not only been maintained ever since but enhanced by many other special rights and privileges. These include preferential consideration in criminal sentencing not available to other disadvantaged people, two separate federal agencies devoted to Aboriginal issues, and hundreds of programmes and billions of dollars in differential spending set aside for Indigenous people.

What this shows is that Aboriginal leaders themselves have not tried to free their people, their lives, or their communities from the fetters of what is still a robust, albeit unhealthy, quasi-colonial relationship with Canada. This, too, is unlike any genocide in history.

The very creation of the TRC itself, as called for by the RRCAP, is a recent and dramatic example of special treatment for Aboriginal people. Ironically, so was the creation of the IRS system even though hundreds of non-Aboriginals residing in remote areas also attended these schools and, more importantly, even though many non-Indigenous students experienced similar traumas and adversities in ordinary public schools. Differential treatmentalso characterized the recent National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls which privileged Aboriginal females over the thousands more non-Aboriginal oneswho have been murdered or gone missing over the decades.

So, how has Indigenous exceptionalism been manifested in the current Kamloops burial issue?

The privileging of these burials is grounded in the six TRC “calls to action” asking for a thorough investigation of all unknown IRS burials and cemeteries, “to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential schoolchildren were buried. This is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour the deceased children.”

The federal government long acceded to this request by earmarking $27 million to do so, although the money was slow to roll out until the discovery of the Kamloops burials put it in the fast lane.

This does not necessarily mean that no assistance should have been given to locating, identifying, and commemorating cemeteries like the Kamloops one or the many others that are already known about or will soon be identified. But it also needs to be asked why the search for and recognition of the hundreds of forgotten, lost, and abandoned cemeteries across the land and overseas containing the remains of other Canadians, including children, has received little or no acknowledgment, let alone any public funding.

One example is in the city of Kamloops itself. Called the Pioneer Cemetery, it operated as the last resting place for town residents from 1876 to 1901. “Subscriptions were taken for the upkeep of the cemetery, but over the years it became overgrown, derelict and vandalized. Headstones were toppled…. The surviving headstones were moved to one corner, but then became disassociated from the graves. Thirty-three grave markers have been preserved. The area became used as a baseball park in 1949.” Sadly, this has been the fate of thousands of burials and hundreds of cemeteries across the country, many of them suffering a worse outcome by having never been acknowledged or commemorated.

These include “pauper cemeteries” like one in British Columbia that has been given much more acknowledgment and restoration than those found across the country as well as the forgotten graveyards of the inmates of federal penitentiaries and jails.

Other abandoned burial grounds include those of the almost unknown “British Home Children,” the 100,000-115,000 offspring of destitute parents sent to Canada between 1869 and 1948 to work as indentured servants for farm families in rural areas. As in the IRS, the children were often taught skills or trades that could help them make a living as adults, which for most boys meant learning how to farm while the girls were taught domestic skills.

But many, perhaps most, of these children were sent to Canada without their parents’ consent. While many were properly treated, others experienced horrific living and working conditions, sometimes including severe psychological, physical or sexual abuse. Unlike the closely monitored and communal IRS, living on isolated farms meant little oversight by the charitable organizations and government authorities ultimately responsible for their care. And unlike those who attended the IRS, “Exploited until they became adults, many of these young immigrants received little or no [formal] education.”

Though it is estimated that over 10 percent of Canadians are descendants of British Home Children and though there was a unanimous House of Commons apology on February 16, 2017 for, “the injustice, abuse and suffering endured by the British Home Children as well as the efforts, participation and contribution of these children and their descendants within our communities; and offer its sincere apology to the former British Home Children who are still living and to the descendants of these 100,000 individuals who were shipped from Great Britain to Canada between 1869 and 1948, and torn from their families to serve mainly as cheap labour once they arrived in Canada,” this included no reparations and no truth and reconciliation commission.

The abandoned remains of many of these children lie in single or mass graves across the country including one in Scarborough, Ontario. Most will never be searched for, let alone found.

But perhaps the saddest of all these unknown, unmarked, or poorly maintained graveyards are the ones containing the remains of the tens of thousands of soldiers of all races and ethnicities at home and abroad who lost their lives in two world wars only to be rewarded by a poorly funded effort recognizing the ultimate price they paid to keep their country free.

Indigenous exceptionalism has been manifested not only in the systemic neglect of the forgotten burying grounds of other ethnicities but in the wholesale media obsession with and promotion of the worst possible interpretation of the Kamloops burials, evidence that xenocentrism is now ruling the mainstream newsrooms of the country.

Still, it is not enough to highlight that the mass and misguided hysteria caused by the discovery of the Kamloops burials, and the many that will follow, are only the latest, albeit most macabre and distorted, examples of special treatment for Aboriginals. Nor is it necessary to belabour the obvious: with Indigenous exceptionalism now on steroids, the $27 million already allocated by the federal government to discover and commemorate these burials will soon be a drop in a bottomless bucket now valued at a billion dollars.

A generally forgotten issue in this rush for compensation is the most important one of all, namely an examination of the kind of fruit its underlying Indigenous exceptionalism has borne. This fruit, all of it exceptionally bitter, some of it listed in the legacy volume of the TRC Report, ranges from poverty to racism to alcohol and drug addiction.

Though the Report says that “These impacts cannot be attributed solely to residential schooling,” it fails to show that they can be attributed mainly to the IRS rather than to other institutions or causes. Nor does it provide any evidence that these impacts are disproportionately found among the minority of students who attended these schools, and supposedly passed them on like some inherited disease not only to their children and grandchildren but to all those around them, compared to the far greater proportion of Aboriginal treaty people whose parents or grandparents never went to any such schools or attended no schools at all.

Instead, as in the case of the whole series of six TRC volumes, the evidence consists of mainly anecdotal oral testimonies of those “Survivors” -- a word always capitalized and always applied to all former students regardless of their experiences, a term that subliminally and perversely compares these students to Holocaust survivors -- who chose to come forward to tell their unexamined and unconfirmed stories with no regard to whether they constituted a representative and/or random selection of living former students. Despite a $72 million budget that could have easily allowed choosing a statistically valid sample, the TRC heard from a mainly aggrieved self-selected cohort of some 6,500 of the estimated 80,000 former students still alive when the hearings began in 2007.

Such is the nature of pre-Enlightenment Aboriginal “knowing” and a betrayal of the foundational idea that without truth -- at least truth based on provable evidence as defined by centuries of British jurisprudence -- there can be no reconciliation.

Privately, some non-Indigenous academics have conceded that collecting and analyzing evidence-based data was not the aim of the TRC. Instead, they say it was a forum for allowing “Survivors” to tell their stories, a reasonable assertion given the way the TRC operated in practice. As Douglas Farrow, professor of Theology and Ethics at McGill University, has recently argued “Such was its mandate [to collect stories]. It was not tasked with a full analysis of the historical record or even with an unbiased sampling of indigenous responses to residential school experience.”

But this premise contradicts the TRC’s official mandate which was “to reveal to Canadians the complex truth [emphasis added] about the history and the ongoing legacy of the church-run residential schools, in a manner that fully documents the individual and collective harms perpetrated against Aboriginal peoples….”

Given the wide publicity the Summary of the Final Report of the TRC received in 2015, it is no surprise that 70 percent of Canadians agreed that, “cultural genocide” was “the residential schools policy and how it was carried out” even though most of the people polled were surely unaware that the Summary was “badly flawed, notably in its indifference to robust evidence gathering, comparative or contextual data, and cause-effect relationships.”

To be sure, as a cultural anthropologist, I have always accepted that Indigenous modes of “knowing” and Enlightenment ways of truth-telling are based on incompatible, perhaps irreconcilable, paradigms, but this should not disqualify my own “complex truth” based on Western science and world history.

My “knowing” says that when states seek to micro-manage the lives of their people, including minority groups, ostensibly to make them better off – whether in the former Soviet Union, China from 1948 to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, or North Korea and Cuba up to the present day, places where hegemonic power by a small elite can only be maintained by the genocidal murder or enslavement, physical and/or mental, of millions of their citizens – they have invariably become worse off or, at the very least, no better off. Conversely, there is a mountain of evidence from around the world showing that most people and distinct cultural groups do best when allowed to freely choose how they want to live.

Though the IRS experience damaged many Indigenous people, what hurt them the most were the other features flowing from their institutionalized exceptionalism, the intertwined issues of welfare dependency and single motherhood and their immediate sequelae surely topping the list. The best proof is the experience of millions of immigrants, often dirt poor and uneducated, since 1960 including people of colour from Asia and the Caribbean who have overcome racism, religious persecution, ostracism, or other discrimination to achieve working class, middle class or higher status, often in a single generation. All this was done without the benefit of patronizing, infantilizing, and dependency-enhancing special status.

Those from the Caribbean include the Black descendants of slaves torn from their West African homelands beginning in the early 17th century and forced to labour in most places for 200 hundred years or more planting and cutting sugar cane from morning to night under the sweltering tropical sun. Though they were often encouraged to accept Christian beliefs and convert to Christianity, they were generally prohibited or discouraged from becoming literate. Yet their descendants managed to survive and even thrive after gaining their freedom between the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This occurred in countries far less prosperous and with far fewer resources than Canada. All this was accomplished, as well, without giving birth to the long menu of pathologies present among too many of our Indigenous people in one of the freest and most developed countries on earth.

Perhaps the best example that minority ethnic groups can survive and prosper without special recognition or privileges comes from Europe, a region now made up of 44 countries but which in earlier millennia was divided among hundreds of different tribes and statelets that pushed out, killed out, absorbed, or accommodated their neighbours. Today, Europe consists of about 160 culturally distinct groups, ethnicities with mutually incomprehensible languages and diverse customs mostly living side by side in relative harmony. This has occurred without proclamations, acts, treaties, constitutional recognition, or other privileges associated with exceptionalism. The same cultural heterogeneity applies to Latin America. Despite the brutalities of Iberian colonization far exceeding anything that ever happened in Canada, and notwithstanding the encouragement of intermating and marriage promoting assimilation, 448 languages are still spoken by over 11 million people alongside Spanish and Portuguese in its South America sub-region in the absence of massive cultural protection or special privileges. The larger Iberian area is home to over 800 different Indigenous peoples totalling 45 million people. Many of them still occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder but are not kept back by the shackles of preferential status in their mainly poor countries.

All these unexceptional examples also show that perhaps the most absurd but unstated assumption in TRC Report is that enculturation and language acquisition are zero-sum games: the more that you learn new cultural practices or gain proficiency in a new language, the more you are bound to unlearn your old cultural traditions and language. This is patently false as the experience of millions of people in those two regions and around the globe who are wholly bilingual and at least partially bicultural shows.

Ironically, the TRC’s summary-report volume admits that this also applies to Canada’s Indigenous people when it claims that “Despite the coercive measures that the government adopted, it failed to achieve its policy goals. Although Aboriginal peoples and cultures have been badly damaged, they continue to exist. Aboriginal people have refused to surrender their identity.”

Looking at all the unexceptional success stories of minority language and cultural retention around the world allows us to better answer the question of whether exceptionalism has made its grassroots Indigenous Canadian carriers better or worse off. Fully answering this question is, of course, complicated by the already mentioned fact that there is no denying that thousands of ethnic groups were killed out, pushed out, or completely absorbed by the forces of warfare and colonialism all over the planet since the dawn of humanity.

And then there is the vexing moral philosophy question of whether cultural survival should be elevated above the survival and well-being of individuals.

What seems clear, however, is that the signing of apartheid-like treaties, the enactment of the separatist Indian Act, and other legislation and practices that surely re****ed the absorption of Western European beliefs, values, and practices have made the first settlers of Canada worse off than they would otherwise be. This can best be seen in the social, economic, and health differentials between Indigenous people and other Canadians. Some of these disparities are explicitly mentioned in the final legacy volume of the TRC Report and constitute the most irrefutable observations in the whole collection of six volumes and accompanying studies. Placed in a comparative national context, these show that Indigenous people on and off-reserve exhibit the highest rates of criminal behaviour and incarceration; the lowest incomes; the highest rates of unemployment, non-working population numbers, poverty, welfare dependency, and homelessness; the most inferior housing; the highest rates of infant mortality; the lowest life expectancy; the highest disease and illness rates; the highest school dropout rates; the highest rates of child apprehension, fostering, and adoption; the highest levels of su***de; the highest rates of sexual abuse; the highest rates of single motherhood; and the highest rates of murdered and missing women.

All these deprivations and pathologies were well known when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau failed in his attempt to enact the provisions of his 1969 White Paper calling for the extinguishment of the racist Indian Act, gradual privatization of reserve land ownership, abolition of the paternalist Department of Indian Affairs, and “removing the specific references to Indians from the constitution … to end the legal distinction between Indians and other Canadians.”

Erasing this legislative framework was based on the White Paper’s premise that, “Special treatment has made of the Indians a community disadvantaged and apart…. [This] requires that the Indian people's role of dependence be replaced by a role of equal status, opportunity and responsibility, a role they can share with all other Canadians…. For many Indian people, one road does exist, the only road that has existed since Confederation and before, the road of different status, a road which has led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration.”

With Cree political activist and lawyer Harold Cardinal, informal leader of the fierce battle against the implementation of the provisions of the White Paper, justifying opposition to the changes by quickly declaring that, “We would rather continue to live in bo***ge under the inequitable Indian Act than surrender our sacred rights,” a view shared by other Indigenous elites “suffering” only from the benefits of this bo***ge, the die was cast. After his efforts to dismantle the formal infrastructure of Indigenous exceptionalism were aborted in 1970, Trudeau angrily retorted with almost an identical message: “We'll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”

Sadly, both men have been proven right. With the dependency-enhancing and ghettoizing exceptionalism-based privileges growing by leaps and bounds ever since, with the gratuitous but lucrative scapegoating of the TRS in overdrive since the announcement of the Kamloops burials, and with no rational discussion of why maladaptive Indigenous policies are madly reinvented time and again, there is almost no hope that a proud and confident Indigenous people will ever be recognized, and recognize themselves, as full and equal citizens of Canada instead of seeing themselves, and being seen by others, as a race apart and as Canada’s eternal victims.

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Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

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