Front Burner - Facts contradict Chrétien’s residential school claims

Episode Date: October 29, 2021

Jean Chrétien says he never heard about abuse in residential schools when he was minister of Indian affairs. As Jorge Barrera and Cindy Blackstock explain, documents suggest otherwise.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Angela Starrett in for Jamie Poisson. Hi, I'm Angela Starrett, in for Jamie Poisson. So this past Sunday, former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was on the Radio-Canada talk show Tout le monde en parle.

He was there to promote his new book. Il vient nous raconter ses nouvelles histoires. Voici l'ancien Premier ministre du Canada, Jean Chrétien. Bienvenue à Tout le monde en parle, Monsieur Chrétien. And he was asked a question about whether he knew about abuse and mistreatment of children in residential school when he was the minister of what was then called the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development from 1968 to 1974. and Northern Development, from 1968 to 1974. Cratchen replied, never. No one ever mentioned that problem when I was minister, he said, never. He then said he did know that there were boarding schools and that he too had gone to a boarding school throughout his childhood. I had to eat beans with lard and porridge, he said. It definitely is hard, the life of a child in boarding school. But there's a lot of evidence that contradicts what Cretchen was saying about not knowing. Today I'm speaking to CBC reporter Jorge

Barrera and Cindy Blackstock, who's the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, about some of that evidence and about the role Cretchen's department played in the history of the residential school system. And just a warning that some of what we're going to talk about today is very distressing. Hi, Cindy and Jorge. Hello. Hello. Thanks for having us. Thanks to both of you for being here.

Cindy, in a moment, we're going to get to, you know, the nuts and bolts of the history surrounding this story and the kind of information Cretan would have had access to. But first, I just want to hear from you, I guess, on a more personal level. What was it like hearing those statements from a former minister of Indian affairs and, of course, a former prime minister. It was a huge sigh, because what we really need to see is former prime ministers and other leaders stepping forward, accepting accountability, and setting an example for Canadians by telling the truth. And what he had to share there, his denial of knowing about the abuse in residential schools is completely against the factual record and the public record. And Jorge, I want to get into what Cindy just said. I mean, Chrétien said that he never heard about abuse of children in residential schools when he was

Minister of Indian Affairs. That was from 1968 to 1974. But you've looked at government records that show that abuse and mistreatment were being reported to the department at that time. What kinds of issues were these reports trying to alert Cretien's department about? Well, there was always a steady drumbeat of field reports going from residential schools, Indian agents, to the department throughout the history of the system. And that was no different under Khrushchev. And just a quick look at the record, you'll see that his department received a lot of reports, including in 1970 in Alert Bay, a staff member was actually pleaded guilty to a charge of indecent assaults, of sexually abusing, fondling girls in a dormitory. There was also four reports from

St. Anne's Residential School, you know, one of the most notorious schools that has emerged from this dark period because they used electric chair but at the time you know the department received you know a report in 1971 that a teacher kept weapons and ammunition in in the class to scare students and then that same teacher was accused of beating one student and kicking in another in a school just that sat just 130 kilometers north of Kachan's hometown of Shawinigan, the school of Latuk, there was a serious incident where police in Latuk actually interviewed four boys who had allegations that they had been sexually abused by a staff member.

So this was ongoing throughout Khrushchev's time. In 1970, two boys ran away from the Kenora Indian Residential School and died, and that was subject to a coroner's inquest. But yet, Minister Khrushchev says he never heard about it. In his department, these reports kept on coming while he was minister. Wow. And I mean, Cindy, beyond the government report, Jorge is talking about what other kinds of information about what was going on in residential school would have been publicly available at this point. I mean, I'm thinking, you know, not just documents,

but out there in the media, in conversations, and so on. I think this is one of the biggest myths, is that people feel that people back then didn't know any better. But as Jorge is pointing out, if you draw back the lessons of history, you're going to see regularly people inside and outside of the department raising the alarm about the maltreatment of these children and in fact even the deaths of the children and the government choosing not to help the kids. So if we look at 1907 for example, we had headlines across the country reading things like absolute inattention to bare necessities of help, children dying like flies in the residential

schools and they were talking about the government of Canada's own public health inspector, Dr. Bryce's report, detailing the gross inequalities in health care spending for First Nations, Métis and Inuit children in these schools compared to other children. And they chose not to help the kids and end these inequalities. The headlines died, and sadly so did the children. in residential schools, you know, at the time that Chrétien was Minister of Indian Affairs, because the feds started to take over direct operation of the schools from churches in 1969. Last month, the church relinquished its control over the schools. The federal government culminated a decade of gradual change by taking complete financial and managerial control of Indian education. Jorge, why was that?

Well, under Khrushchev, the pure Trudeau liberal government really started to speed up the winding down of the residential school system. By the time that Khrushchev took over, it was widely understood within the department and also in public discourse that the system was broken, that it wasn't working. And the department was also motivated by money, by cost-cutting. It actually saw it as a cheaper option to put children into provincial schools than to continue to spend the capital costs for maintaining these institutions.

Ottawa will phase out 11 schools from Dauphin, Manitoba to Alert Bay, B.C. that operate as combined resident schools. These segregate Indian youngsters from white society, and instead Ottawa will convert the schools into residents only and send children by bus to integrated schools in towns. So we've talked about what Chrétien was doing as minister and the kinds of information he would have had access to in that role. But now I want to talk more about his personal life,

the kinds of things he may have learned from people he knew. Jorge, earlier this week, you also spoke to a man named John Moses, whose father, Russell Moses, worked in the Department of Indian Affairs under Chrétien. My father was the late Russ Moses. He was a member of the Delaware Band from the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory in Brantford, Ontario. He was born on... Russell Moses was also a survivor of the notorious Ontario residential school, the Mohawk Institute. I think that was also called the

Mush Hole. And in 1965, when he first started working for Indian Affairs, his manager asked him to write an account of his time at that residential school. And a warning again to our audience that these are really awful details. But can I ask you first, Jorge, really awful details. But can I ask you first, Jorge, what were some of Russell Moses, what were some of the things that he recounted in that document? One of the things he spoke about was about the diet, the food. I would say here that 90% of the children were suffering from diet deficiency. And this was evident by the number of boils, warts, and general malaise that existed within the school population. I have seen Indian children eating from the swill barrel,

picking out soggy bits of food that were intended for the pigs. He also spoke about the kind of violence that they were subjected to. One of the modes of punishment that they used in the school when he attended was to put kids through, and these were supervised, gauntlets. We had a form of running the gauntlet in which the infender had to go through on his hands and knees through the widespread legs of all the other boys and he would be struck with anything that was at hand. I've seen boys after going through a gauntlet of 50 to 70 other boys lying crying in the most abject human misery and pain with not a soul to care, the dignity of man. And he also says...

And really, this is not my story, but yours. And this went to a senior official with the department. Yeah. And then in 1969, Russell Moses ends up working under Chrétien in the Department of Indian Affairs for three years. Does John say that his father personally knew Jean Chrétien? Yes, they traveled together across the country. He was a special advisor who was brought in to deal with a follow-up of the white paper and that, yes, they did. He says they must have spoken about their personal life

and he believes that his father would have recounted his experience in the mush hole and plus the whole outline of his father's experience, of Russell Moses' experience, was in the hands of senior officials in that same department. And so did John Moses think it was feasible that Chrétien would not have heard his father's story? No, he doesn't think it was. He thinks it's hard to believe that Chrét Chan wouldn't have known about it. Simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

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In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. Let's talk about another personal relationship in Chrétien's life. In that same Radio Canada interview, he noted that he adopted an Indigenous boy. He told the host that, quote, this proves my investment in this issue, end quote. And Crutchin was talking here about his son, Michel, who is Indigenous and who the Crutchins adopted from an orphanage in 1970. And that story could probably be a whole episode. We certainly can't get into all of it right now. But Cindy, I want to put another quote from Chrétien to you. This is something that he said in his 1995 biography by Lawrence Martin.

Quote, nobody told me that there was a big problem to take Indians, that the record was not good. End quote. Cindy, what does that say to you? It says to me that he was really in denial of what the record actually showed. In 1967, there was a report delivered to the Department of Indian Affairs by a guy named George Caldwell. In that report, he said the keynote recommendation is that more support should be given in the, quote, Indian family to keep children together. And he details how the harms have come up of these children being taken from their families unnecessarily and placed in these residential schools. It's unthinkable that this information was not available. Clearly was. He either chose not to read it or he chose not to believe it.

And that's exactly what happened in the 60sop and residential school, were both created under this false assumption that Indigenous parents weren't human. They were called subhuman and weren't worthy of taking care of their own children. And I want to talk about this a little bit more, Jorge. It's maybe worth noting that this adoption of Gretchen's son, Michel, took place during this time known as the Sixties Scoop. That's when tens of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities, from their Indigenous communities, and adopted out into mainly white families. Many of them were adopted into even other countries. A report released this week in Ottawa by the Canadian Council on Social Development

says the Canadian child welfare system may be doing more harm than good to Native children, families, and communities. The author of the report is Patrick Johnston, a former program director at the Social Development Council. He says Native children are frequently and wrongly taken out of their home and away from their family. What makes it worse, he said, is that most Native children end up in non-Native foster and adoptive homes, a situation that only compounds problems for Native children,

families, and communities. And so coming back to Cretien's quote, quote, nobody told me that there was a big problem to take Indians, that the record was not good. End quote. I'm wondering if you could give us a little bit more context on on the 60 scoop and the role that that Kretien's government played in it. You know, Kretien at the time when he was minister actually acknowledged that it was better to keep children in the family units. He actually said that it was better to keep them with their families than to put them in the best-run residential school. But at the same time, his department did see fostering out children as a really good thing.

They saw it as a good thing in terms of finances. If they could get children out of residential schools and into the foster system, they figured it would be cheaper. The department really wanted to wind down these residential schools. It just saw them as a failure and they saw this, you know, fostering out, putting children into the provincial education system as a way to achieve their integration goals, which gave us the 60 Scoop. The picture that you paint is just such a direct correlation that I don't know if a lot of people have really examined before.

Do you think it's fair to say that Chrétien played a pretty prominent role in the ramping up of the 60 Scoop? Yes. that Chrétien played a pretty prominent role in the ramping up of the 60s scoop? Yes, well, when he was minister and under the Pierre Trudeau government, yes, there was a massive transition by the department to have the provinces play a bigger role in education, in child welfare. And this is what created the foundation for the mass adopting out of children. This was the moment. With so many elements in the child care system,

Patrick Johnson says he can't point a finger at just one villain. I wish there were. I wish there was one villain. The problem is that there are lots of villains. I think to some extent we're all villains. I think that certainly many officials in Indian Affairs are villains because this situation is not unknown to them at all. And Cindy, I want to fast forward to Jean Chrétien's time as prime minister. During that time, you played a role in the creation of a government commissioned report that found that children on reserve weren't receiving the same level of care from the government as non-Indigenous kids

off reserve. And this report included a bunch of recommendations for change. But after this report came out, what did Chrétien's government do about it? Well, they accepted the recommendations. I remember getting a letter from the minister. We sent it to Prime Minister Chrutchen himself. And they said they were going to review this. And then they did nothing. And the failure of the federal government to implement that report, Angela, directly led to the Assembly of First Nations and the Caring Society filing that human rights complaint against the federal government in 2007, a case we are still litigating against

today. Ottawa is on the hook for billions of dollars in compensation related to the on-reserve child welfare system. It had previously been ordered to pay each affected child $40,000. Will the government appeal today's ruling again, continue that legal battle? And of course tomorrow is the deadline for the federal government to decide whether it's going to fight First Nations kids again by taking those federal court orders that demanded justice for First Nations kids and appealing them to the federal court of appeal. Yeah, you just said it there. You're still fighting this today, like literally today. Yeah, and that pattern is still in place, right?

It's just that the government doesn't want to be held accountable. It consistently chooses a path forward that protects the government from any accountability and voice the harm onto children and families. And that's the pattern we have to break. I want to broaden this out beyond Christiane and the government because, you know, just this year, after the Tukumlups Nishikwapmuk announced that they had identified what could be, you know, more than 200 potential unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. There were Canadians who said they hadn't known about the abuses and the deaths that happened at institutions.

I mean, we watched this sort of awakening of this reality across the country. reality across the country. What does this story say to you about the historical amnesia, you know, willing or otherwise, that the Canadian public is having to confront right now? I'll start with you, Jorge. You know, it's hard to understand why this part of history just keeps getting forgotten, never sort of sticks into the collective sort of memory of this country. But perhaps because of all these layers had been laid leading up to this summer's discoveries, maybe now they've taken root and they will change the way we think about it as a country and also the way that we talk about it. I've been wondering about that a lot too.

Like I remember, you know, people were sort of shocked in 2016 and I kind of was thinking about this, like are we going to like forget everything again and then we're going to be going through this all over again in a few years. Cindy, what about you? What do you think this story says about, you know, the sweeping of this history under the historical carpet that the Canadian public is now confronting again right now? Well, I think what it says is that there's been a deliberate and unfortunately highly successful propaganda campaign by the federal and provincial and territorial governments to convince Canadians that there is no ongoing injustice. That they've all fixed it now with their apologies and their symbolic behaviors. And this deliberate campaign of propaganda

found its way into the public school system where people were either told nothing or they were told a very whitewashed version of history. And there's been a real denial of the clear and obvious physical markers, even of the deaths of children. For example, in the Kretchen area, there were graveyards on these schools, Angela.

I mean, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to say this is a problem when you go to a school and it has graveyards. But that just shows you how the government tried to bury this in plain sight. Cindy and Jorge, thank you both so much for your time today. I really appreciate this and all the work both of you are doing and have done over the years on this. Thank you. It was great to be on the show. And thank you so much for having me. Just a note here, a National Indian Residential School crisis line has been set up to provide support for survivors and those affected. That number is 1-866-925-4419.

We did request a comment from Jean Chrétien, but we didn't hear back. And before we go, an update on a story we've covered on the show before. On Thursday, former Canadian Armed Forces reservist and accused neo-Nazi Patrick Matthews was sentenced to nine years in prison in the U.S., this over his role in a violent plan to trigger a race war in Virginia. Tomorrow you can find the first episode of White Hot Hate, a new CBC podcast about the Matthews case and the rise of white supremacist accelerationism here in our feed.

That's all for today. Front Burner is brought to you by CBC News and CBC Podcasts. This show was produced this week by Simi Bassi, Imogen Burchard, Ali Janes, Katie Toth, and Derek van der Wijk. Thank you. The executive producer of FrontBurner is Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Angela Stair in for Jamie Poisson. I'll be back with you again next week.