Front Burner - What’s fueling residential school denialism?

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

A warning: this episode discusses the trauma and harms surrounding Canada's residential school history. Please listen with care. So much of what we know about Canada's residential schools has been established as fact. More than 150 thousand Indigenous children and youth were taken from their families and required to attend these schools. Several thousand students died.Although all of this is well-documented and verified, there has been a growing discourse calling those facts into question. Researchers, commentators and some politicians have really zeroed in on the 2021 discovery of suspected graves near a former residential school in Kamloops.Academics and Indigenous leaders call this residential school denialism — similar to Holocaust denialism. Many of them have called for adding the denial of residential school history to the Criminal Code as a form of hate speech.Earlier this month, a Nunavut senator brought forward a motion to amend Bill C-9, the Liberals’ anti hate bill, to do just that – but it was voted down.Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair have been tracking the rise of residential school denialism in Canada. Their book, “Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism”, comes out this September.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Shopping for a car should be exciting, not exhausting. But sometimes it can feel like a maze. That's where Car Gurus comes in. They have advanced search tools, unbiased deal ratings, and price history. So you know a great deal when you see one. It's no wonder Car Gurus is the number one rated car shopping app in Canada on the Apple app and Google Play Store. Buy your next car today with Car Gurus at Cargooros.ca. Go to cargoos.ca to make sure your big deal is the best deal.

That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-U-S dot CA. Cargooros.ca.ca. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jason Markasoff in for Jamie. So much of what we know about Canada's residential schools has been established as fact. Through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, decades worth of survivor testimony and research. The systematic government-sponsored attempt to destroy indigenous culture and language.

More than 150,000 indigenous children and youth were taken from their families and required to attend these schools. several thousand students died. Although all of this is well documented and verified, in recent years, there has been a growing discourse calling those facts into question. Researchers, commentators, and some politicians have really zeroed in on the 2021 discovery of suspected graves

near a former residential school in Kamloops. They take some imprecise claims about what was found, along with the lack of excavation so far, and use that as proof to argue that the whole official narrative is wrong. academics and indigenous leaders call this residential school denialism similar to Holocaust denial. Many of them have called for condoning or denying residential school history to be added to the criminal code as a form of hate speech. Earlier this month, a Nunavut Senator brought forward a motion to amend Bill C-9, the Liberals anti-hate bill, to do just that, but the Senate voted it down. Sean Carlton and Negon-Sinclair have been tracking the rise of residential school denialism in Canada.

They both teach in the Indigenous Studies Department at the University of Manitoba. And they have a book coming out on this issue in September. It's called Truth Before Reconciliation, confronting residential school denial of them. Hey, Sean. Hi, thanks for having me. Hey, Nagan. Hello. Nagon, it's great to be with you.

I'm usually on a power and politics panel with you, but nice to be on the other side of the microphone from you. It's great to be talking. Like I mentioned in the introduction, the Senate rejected the amendment to C9 that would have criminalized residential school denialism. Pierre Moro, he's the Carney government's point man in the Senate. He argued that there wasn't legal analysis or consultation before the amendment was introduced. But despite that, there continues to be this big push for legislation to criminalize residential school denialism. Sean, is that something you would support? Well, I mean, I think we need to start, actually, with why the liberal government decided not to

include residential school denialism in a bill that is about commenting hate and racism, knowing how severe residential school denialism has become, despite their efforts to say that they want to challenge it, didn't include it in the bill in the first place. And I mean, I know that there is a lot of discussion about whether this is the right move. And a lot of people will say it's an infringement on free speech. And Nigon and I have actually explained how criminalization of of Holocaust denialism, for example, hasn't necessarily been the most effective way of challenging it. So there's lots of different arguments. But I think what is important in this conversation is that currently in 2022, the conservatives introduced a private member's bill that then got picked up

by the liberals to criminalize Holocaust denialism, right? The willful downplay minimization of a genocide far away a long time ago. And this has created a situation. where the willful downplay, denial, minimization of a genocide much more recently in our own backyard is fine. And this has created, I think, a legal imbalance that many indigenous leaders and legal experts have pointed out and called for the Canadian government to address. And I think that's, you know, in short, why we're here. Nagan, what are your thoughts on the question of whether to criminalize residential school denialism? What Sean said is absolutely current. there's a legal imbalance here.

And I think on top of that, it's also created a situation in which there's more division. And so the federal government, by trying to pass legislation that's trying to reduce hate and division and try to perhaps deal with individuals in this country, trying to wedge issues between Canadians and spread misinformation are now completely scot-free. They have no behind the blanket of what they claim to be free. speech, which in fact is not really free speech, because what it is is it's speech that's intended for harm. It's not intended for reasonable dialogue. Racism is never reasonable dialogue, nor is spreading false narratives based in absolute nonsense. So the proposed amendment, and there was

also an NDPMP, Leah Gazan, who tried to bring this forth in the past. Survivors and their families deserve to heal from this intergenerational tragedy and be free from violence. violent hate, and we cannot allow their safety and well-being to be put further at risk. All parliamentarians must stand firm against all forms of damaging hate speech, including the denial of the tragedy of the residential schools in Canada. The proposal would be to make it a criminal code to willfully promote hatred, quote, against indigenous people by condoning, denying, or downplaying the Indian residential school system.

To give us a sense, Sean, can you an example of what might amount to hate speech under this definition? Sure. Well, let me start with what won't qualify. We're not talking about having a conversation at your dinner table or a conversation of colleagues trying to understand particular issues. Really, what's going on if you read the language of the amendment is the willful promotion of the downplay, the minimization, the attempt to cause harm. And what would qualify? Well, the creation of, you know, self-published books or conspiratorial documentaries that are really propaganda, right, that are attempts to cast all survivors as liars, as untrustworthy. The people that are deliberately, willfully, creating this material, benefiting from it,

profiting from it, monetizing misinformation, using it for their own political gain, just like the folks that are engaging in Holocaust denial. There is the issue that we have hate speech laws that have been around for decades. Do those not cover it off? I think if we lived in a society in which we embedded a sense of respect and responsibility to indigenous peoples, we may have laws that are broad-based, that may deal with these very specific issues in which indigenous peoples are targeted. But unfortunately, we don't live in that situation.

We don't live in that society. and for such a long period of history in virtually every single corner of this country, the normalization of hating indigenous peoples, perhaps we've seen this the most evident in government, in the justice system, in the schools that we exist within. And so we really have to take a targeted approach, as opposed to a broad-based approach and sort of trust the broad span of laws, which, as we can see, protect one group of people very, very well, or a few groups of people, but do a terrible job protecting people who have been historically marginalized and continue to me. Now, is criminalization the only remedy? And I think that that's

the real question here. And I think that, you know, desperate times call for desperate measures. And I think many of those who are seeking criminalization have for decades. And think about my father being one, the former head of the commissioner, through the Reconciliation Commission, Marie Sinclair, Ibn, and also some of the many different individuals who have been in the education system for decades upon decades upon decades, have said, let's do this through education. Let's do this through kindness. We set up a whole commission for six years to talk about the issue and then created 94 calls to action in a peaceful, just institutional fashion to try to deal with the issue of the chronic ignorance. the chronic situation involving indigenous peoples who are treated as deficient and Canadians that are treated as superior. And we have a real problem in the society and that is part of every single part of our societies I mentioned before. That doesn't seem to be doing it as much because we see this festering and this fostering of hatred towards indigenous peoples that seems to be enduring. And people are dying in ERs.

People are dying in the child welfare system and then the justice system. and no one's being held to account. And as a result, I think individuals are growing impatient. They want the change to happen. So as like almost a statement or as a measure? Well, it seems to be that some have reached that conclusion. I mean, we've written a book. So what are we saying? What we're saying is that we need more public dialogue, more conversation. And I have a of the position that individuals who want to spread unreasonable, completely arbitrarily created information that poses as facts. and those who want to foster hatred based on ignorance and try to profit on misinformation, I don't think that's very reasonable.

I think a reasonable dialogue can defeat that. However, others feel that we need to take more drastic steps and far be it from me to step in the way of that because a society is a society is a society. And on top of that, you know, certainly people in the Jewish community have felt that their reasonable dialogue with those who profess hatred certainly is not. not a progressive way to go. I would add to that just quickly as a historian. I mean, this is essentially how Canada's hate speech laws came into being in the first place. The rampant rise of neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, you know, prompted a number of folks to feel that the limitation on that speech was justified in that in that moment. I mean, the rise of anti-Indigenous racism that we are seeing, people will say, this is just mean things that people say on the internet. That is

not true. You know, Nigon and I live in a city where there was a serial killer targeting indigenous women who was posting residential school denialism at the time of his murders. What about where are you now? Jeremy Skibikski, convicted of four counts of first-degree murder for killing Morgan Harris, Mercedes Myron, Rebecca Contois, and a fourth woman known as Buffalo woman, identified by a jacket. This whole thing about racial purity. He explained he met the women outside homeless shelters had sex and killed them in his apartment, thinking their lives were already wasted. Residential school monuments are being targeted with graffiti, racial slurs, Nazi iconography. You know, in British Columbia, where I'm originally from, you know,

a guy drove his truck through a march of survivors yelling racist slurs at them. So I think, you know, this is, to quote you back to yourself, Jason, we've reached this point where a number of of different things need to be done. And the law is only one tool, as Nekona and I have argued, right? And we need to recognize also that that actually Canada's hate speech laws, right, and haven't been very effective, actually. And many legal scholars argue that it's largely symbolic to actually get a prosecution on these issues. Like, there have only been a handful. But it's still important to do because, you know, it signifies that, you know, it signifies that, that Canada is a country that is committed to tolerance, compassion, mutual respect, and not hate,

and racism. So residential school denialists don't outright deny the existence of schools or even their documented harms necessarily. It's often about downplaying, challenging established facts and survivors' accounts. Can you walk me through how this issue has evolved over the years, Sean? As Nigon mentioned off the top, residential school denialism is certainly on the rise, but it's not new. In fact, many of the arguments that denialists will try to use, it's well-intentioned.

It was a system of the past or of the times that we can't critique. Abuse is being exaggerated. Death didn't happen or they were natural. Many of these arguments have been used from the beginning of the system to justify its ongoing operation, to downplay or dismiss critiques by students or parents or community. leaders. Arguments such as? The system was well-intentioned. It was necessary. Indigenous people should be grateful for the education that was being provided. You know, indigenous people are inferior and we're trying to uplift them. And you see a lot of that argument

in the residential school denialist books and documentaries, right? That Canada the Good tried to help out indigenous people. Mistakes maybe were made, but we need to move forward. and realize how grateful indigenous people should be. And that's really just putting, you know, a positive spin on a genocidal system. You know, I think we need to realize that that the folks that are mostly engaging and creating deliberately this content have that agenda. The problem with dealing with many residential school denialists is it's like playing whack-a-mole.

As soon as you hit one, then two others pop up because it's seen as profitable. And you can gain attention and eyeballs and then therefore profit monetize that. We're always going to have individuals that want to profit on miseducation on the fact that Canadians just generally don't know what happened in the schools. But there are increasingly more and more. If you go to any school these days, one of the most popular days at that school is Orange Shirt Day, where students talk about it. They talk about what it means, but also most importantly what they can do about it.

And so I think this is going to perhaps be at a moment of an apex at some point in the near future. And then as younger people take over, there is a fluency about not just indigenous history, but Canadian history, because that's what residential school history is, it's a Canadian history, that young people understand this more than ever. And they just simply won't tolerate people who want to say that there's fire in a theater when there's no fire. They just won't tolerate it. Shopping for a car should be exciting, not exhausting. But sometimes it can feel like a maze. That's where Car Gurus comes in.

They have advanced search tools, unbiased deal ratings, and price history. So you know a great deal when you see one. It's no wonder Car Gurus is the number one rated car shopping app in Canada on the Apple app and Google Play Store. Buy your next car today with Car Gurus at Cargooros.ca. Go to cargooros.ca. Go to Cargooros.ca. That's C-A-R-G-U-R-U-S-D-C-A. Car gurus.com. All right, summer is here.

You're out and about. You've got a barbecue to go to or you've got some picnics or, I don't know, maybe a concert. I get it. You are busy. Who's got time to keep up with pop culture? The answer is me. I do. I've got the time.

My name is Elamine, and on my show, commotion, we go beyond the surface of what's new and exciting on television or at the theater or on a bookshelf near you. So if you need help, staying up to date, you can find and find and find and, follow commotion on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. So let's talk about who else is involved with this. So we've seen in recent years this group of about two dozen or so, maybe more retired academics, lawyers, writers who are organizing around this issue, to generate skepticism about Canada's residential school history. Francis Widowson, a former professor of economics, justice, and policy studies at Calgary's

Mount Royal University appears to be a central figure in all this. She understands her beliefs around residential schools, for example, that children benefited from the education there to be the true account of what happened. And she suggested that residential school survivors have misremembered their experiences. Can you tell me more about the people behind this movement? Well, I mean, I think what we need to understand, and you reference this, is that this is actually a very small group. You know, they've self-acknowled that it's a handful of folks organized,

not more than about 20, in an email group, that talk about how to develop talking points, to challenge particular residential school stories. And then they create that content, they develop it, they push it out on right-wing media, and it gets boosted online. One of the things I always argue is that residential school denialism is getting louder. It's not necessarily growing in the sense

that it's always still the same handful of folks. And in fact, it's important to point out that many of these people were promoting anti-indigenous ideas before their cause was residential schools. Many of the folks, for example, one of Stephen Harper's former advisors, Tom Flanagan, Thomas Flanagan, as part of the Calgary School, right, has been developing anti-indigenous discourse, you know, about tax policy and other kinds of issues before. They've just now focused on residential schooling. This is why Nigon and I always talk about, we need to understand the strategy, not just the substance of residential school denialism. In fact, if we are stuck in debating the substance, their ideas, we've already lost because they try and entrap you, right, as if it's a reasonable debate, as if it's a reasonable discussion, just like Holocaust denialism.

If you're debating whether Zilcon B was used in gas chambers or not, you've already become entrapped. in the web of Holocaust denialism. Well, I'm not, I'm not indigenous. I am Jewish and even hearing, you talk about Zyclon gas, like there's, there's a resonance to it. Of course. I mean, you know, this is the thing is that the same,

they're using deliberately the same tax of Holocaust denialism. What does this sound like? Was it six million Jews that died, or was it three, or maybe two? How can we really trust survival, a testimony about the mass execution techniques if they survived. And they're trying to appeal to people who either already hate indigenous people or are fearful that reconciliation is going to take something away from them.

And so I think, you know, the more we understand the strategy of residential school denialism, the better we can intervene and find ways to make sure that we don't miss our opportunity to make progress on truth and reconciliation. There's one strategy that Sean, that list of strategies we might have missed out on, and I spend a lot of time with Holocaust survivors. And if you talk to Holocaust survivors, they would often say, you know, like many of the relationships I created in, while being interned, I still have some of those relationships, and I still have individuals that I know that I talk to, that I care about. nobody would ever use that as the basis for saying the Holocaust was good.

But it is amazing how many residential school denialists will say, this person who spoke about making a friend, this person who spoke about learning a skill, this person who spoke about having a good day, made that the whole system was fine. Everything was fine. And it is the most absurd, nonsensical, unreasonable argument in bad faith you could ever make about residential schools. Let's unpack what's become the root in the last five years or so of the arguments of residential school denialism. Five years ago now, to come loops to Swetmach, the First Nation, made a pretty definitive statement, though they later soften their language. They say this in this media release telling us that they hired a specialist in ground-penetrating radar who carried out this survey of the site. And they say that those missing children were as young as three years old and that to their knowledge, these deaths, were undocumented.

A period of national grieving followed. Today, some of the children who were found in Kemploops and who have yet to be found in other places across the country would have been grandparents or great-grandparents. They would have been elders, knowledge-keepers, and community leaders. They are not. And that is the fault of Canada. In Brantford, mourners placed 215 pairs of shoes on the steps of Canada's oldest residential school.

A similar site outside a Catholic church in Montreal. The community there marching for all indigenous kids who never returned home. Hundreds of millions of dollars have gone from government money toward different First Nations across the country to search for missing victims at residential schools there. The first statement issued by the Kempelho's First Nation about the grave sites was done in more certainty. but then the explanation became more ambiguous later on. Sean, can you walk us through that? Sure.

Well, I mean, I think the first thing that we need to start with is actually that, you know, for a lot of Canadians, this came out of nowhere. But, you know, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had a whole volume, volume four, on unmarked burials and missing children. And calls to action 71 to 76 address the need for more work to be done on learning more about deaths and missing children in residential schools because government and churches still did not give all the documents to the TRC, right?

And so Kamloops was one of the nations doing this work. They already knew that more than 50 children died at that school. And they were using different forms of technology, including ground penetrating radar, to examine sites of interest. And what they did is they combine their oral history with archival information and GPR technology. And their preliminary announcement was that they had confirmed that there were these additional deaths.

And what they were, you know, trying to do is, I mean, even the GPR technologist, right, who did that survey explained that, you know, GPR can't determine that there are grades or bodies, right? But with additional information, sites of interest can be confirmed. The problem is that this is confusing. And I think a lot of folks, indigenous, non-Indigenous in the media, in politics, you know, didn't understand, including myself, right, as a historian, you know, what was being discussed. And denialists saw an opportunity in that ambiguity. And so what has happened in the last number of years is that as indigenous people are trying to learn more about deaths and missing children in these institutions, denialists are trying to hive off. support. They're trying to create a backlash narrative to distract people away from the fact that,

for example, in Ontario, the coroner launched an investigation to get more access to records from church and state and confirmed an additional 220 deaths in that province that the TRC didn't report, right? That's not getting attention. What's getting attention is the, you know, the mass grave conspiracy theory that a lot of these denialists have dined out on for five years. and use to challenge and delegitimize indigenous communities, denigrate indigenous children on the internet for money, right? That's what's going on. I take your point, Sean, that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had discussed this at length, and this was known and unpacked and researched at length about unmarked burial sites,

people who died there. But it wasn't until the discovery at Kamloops that we saw, you know, this large public outpouring of sorrow, of grief, of, you know, small. children's shoes in memorial sites. And then seven weeks after that original statement by the First Nation came, the archaeologist, as you were mentioning, Dr. Sarah Ballew, hired by the nation to oversee the search, said, quote, with ground penetrating radar, we can never definitively say that they are human remains until you excavate, which is why we need to pull back a little bit and say they are probable. What impact did the debate about that have? Let's be clear for just a minute here.

And I think that this is where we get into the macabre element of the podcast or the discussion involving residential schools. Anyone who wants to see bodies and as evidence that children died were put into dire situations, tried to escape and were tragically perished, that the schools were chronically created as virtual prisons and death traps. and that's which you, you know, poor ventilation, poor food. The fact is that there was situations of dire harm in almost every single job that you did within the residential school, from farm work to housework to laundry, you know. And so, like, the whole idea that we're talking about bodies right now is, is evidence that there is a great issue of respect that's needed when it talks about the issue of residential schools. I wonder sometimes when what would it be like if you were a person who experienced a genocide

and that you were asked to show us the bodies, show us the bodies in Rwanda, show us the bodies in Poland, show us the bodies in Bosnia. And, you know, how would you feel about that? And then how would your families feel about that? And then on top of that, if somebody said that those bodies didn't exist and they were just all made up because you're trying to make money, and how would that build into a nation? And so, you know, this whole idea, you know, anyone who wants to see bodies, A, doesn't understand what science is, is that when bodies are buried inappropriately, which undoubtedly was the case, you would have organic material that wouldn't just stay in a fixed location.

It's going to take decades upon decades up to a century to be able to figure out through soil testing, because you want to treat that gravesite with the respect and dignity, it deserves. You can't just go in there with a with a bulldozer and just start, you know, ex, like, it's, it's absurd just even talking about it, that we're going to go in there and sort of just start blasting away at the land and, uh, and think that this is some sort of respectful process that's going to build a healthy relationship in the country. And so, uh, what I can say about the idea of, of searching for bodies is, is that, um, I hope that we do so with a great deal of respect. I hope that there's a warning on this podcast, that the fact that we're even talking about it

and that it's a situation of distress for somebody like myself, when I would go to residential school events, and I went to virtually, you know, a large segment, maybe more than almost anybody else because of my father's role within the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Every single event put me into crisis. Every single event resulted in days and upon days of depression, of anxiety, of great pain looking at photographs, looking at photographs, looking at at photographs of people who looked like my relatives looked like those individuals who had experienced the schools that I loved and deeply admired. And then never mind the fact that I had to listen to testimonies. And in those testimonies, people wouldn't have made that up. The idea that anyone would

have made that up is so egregious and so disrespectful. It can only be thought of as anyone who would say otherwise simply wasn't there. So the issues of bodies, if I could be so bold, is to say that this is the part of the dialogue or in residential school denialism that is the most sensitive because what it does is it really gets to the heart of what I think is a real sickness in Canadian society in the treatment

of indigenous peoples. The Globe Mail has reported last month that the nation is scheduled to do a site excavation, some archaeological work. Nagan, what's the importance of that? Is that to quell the, the debate or is it for the more broad pursuit of truth and continuing to do that work called on by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

If there's anything that is proven time and time again, it is that those who have been most impacted by Canada's aggressive, destructive, genocidal policies have been the first to step up to talk about how we can move together positively. No excavation is being done in response to a denialist claim or to the ignorance of Canadians or the misinformation that Canadians have been fed for 150, 130, 100, whatever it is, years. The reason that indigenous communities are seeking excavations and in whatever ways that that looks like is because we have nephews, nieces, children, sons and daughters. And in my case, uncles and aunties, grandparents, that have never been found, that they went to those schools

and no one ever knows what happened to them. Or if we did know, we only know small shadows of what had happened to them. In order to move together, we have to understand that this is a situation all of us are going to have to deal with for the rest of our lives and probably for our generations to come lives, because this is a blemish, a tragedy, a harm, a wound that all of us are carrying. And as a result, we all have a responsibility to take care of each other, to be kind and to be generous. Because that's the only way that healing happens is through listening and through walking together, helping each other when we stumble and when we fall. And I think probably most of all is that, you know, we've got to build a lodge together. We've got to build a home together.

We've got to build a nation together. And it's going to be done much more so through conversations like this than it will ever be through denying, you know, credentialed. truth. To wrap up, Sean, this denial and this questioning of the established record, what impact do you think it's having on the relationship between indigenous people and non-indigenous people more broadly in the country? Well, I think the goal of denialists is to try to shake public confidence in reconciliation generally, right? And they're using residential schools as the wedge. And that would mean you see, you know, this questioning, not of just residential, school truths, but of land claims, of indigenous partnerships, trying to dehumanize and discredit and

delegitimize the work of reconciliation, of what Nigon just said, of the building of a lodge, a home, a future together. That's what is threatening. And I think that Canadians want to develop a stronger and better future that we can all be proud of. And reconciliation is an opportunity rather than a threat. And so I'm hopeful that, you know, we can learn not just the full history of residential schools, but also how people are trying to use denialism to challenge that so that we can move forward together, so that we can look towards the future with hope and optimism, rather than distrust and hatred. Sean, Nagan, thank you so much for this conversation. Miigwech. Thanks. Thanks so much, Jason.

That's all for today. I'm Jason Markisov. Thanks for listening to front burner. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.