Rory Leishman: 

What can account for the unprecedented outburst of anti-Christian rage in Canada that has fueled the incineration of 20 Christian churches and the defacing of dozens more with red and orange paint?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau blames the Catholic and Protestant churches that operated Indian Residential Schools (IRS) on behalf of the government of Canada. In a statement on July 2, he said: “it is unacceptable and wrong that acts of vandalism and arson are being seen across the country, including against Catholic churches.” But then, he added: “I understand the anger that’s out there against the federal government, against institutions like the Catholic Church. It is real and it’s fully understandable, given the shameful history that we are all becoming more and more aware of.”

Is that right? Are most Canadians really becoming more and more aware of the convoluted and true history of the Indian Residential Schools?

Absolutely not. Over the past 20 years, Canadians have been misled by the grotesquely twisted accounts of the church-run Indian Residential Schools served up by both politicians like Trudeau and the mass media.

Unhinged media

Thus, on June 24, the CBC kicked off World Report, its morning newscast, with the frenzied accusation: “What happened? What led to those children being murdered? And let’s be blunt about it: They were murdered.” 

CBC producer Mark Prendergast intervened to explain that the speaker was Wayne Semaganis, Chief of Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan, and that he was reacting to news about the discovery of an estimated 751 unmarked graves in a cemetery at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School. In concluding this segment of the broadcast, Prendergast stated: “After almost one hundred years of operation, the building has been torn down, but the horrors of what happened there have not been forgotten.”

On June 23, the Globe and Mail published a no-less unhinged allegation by Bobby Cameron, Chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations in Saskatchewan: “We will do a search of every Indian Residential School site and we won’t stop there,” Cameron avowed. “We will also search all of the sanatoriums, Indian hospitals and all the sites where people were taken and abused, tortured, neglected and murdered. We will tell the stories of our children, of our people who died, who were killed by the state, by the churches, and we won’t stop until we locate all of them. The world is watching as we unearth the findings of genocide.”

Mass murder; genocide perpetrated by Christians: Would the CBC or the Globe and Mail broadcast such scurrilous charges against Jews or Muslims?

In the face of some damning allegation against a person or group, a competent reporter would normally probe for some reason to believe the accusation might be true. As it is, the CBC and Globe and Mail let the patently false accusations by Semaganis and Cameron stand without comment.

Most editors, producers and reporters at other mainstream newspapers and broadcasters in Canada have done no better in covering the church-run residential schools. And the same is true of the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established by the federal government in 2008 with a mandate to “promote awareness and public education of Canadians about the IRS system and its impacts.”

In its Final Report, the TRC included the all-too-typical testimony of Doris Young about murder at a residential school in Elkhorn, Manitoba: I remember … there was (sic) all these screams, and there was blood over the, the walls. (Crying) … and we were told that if we, if we were, if we ever told, or tried to run away, we would, the same thing would happen to us. (Crying) So, it was a dangerous time for, for children, and for me at that, those days. (Crying) We really never knew who would be next to be murdered.”

The TRC related that Young had nightmares about this atrocity for years and “eventually reported the incident to the police as an adult.” Young testified that “The RCMP investigated, they said they couldn’t find anything.”

In short, neither Young nor the TRC offered any corroborating evidence of her nightmarish memory of a child being murdered at her IRS. Furthermore, despite an exhaustive six-year investigation at a cost to taxpayers of $72 million, the TRC was unable to corroborate any of the many other allegations of murder in an IRS. In the end, the TRC conceded: “The RCMP reports to having investigated fifteen deaths in the schools, but no charges were laid as they concluded that all the deaths were accidental or due to illness.”

In a separate report commissioned by the TRC, Scott Hamilton, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology at Lakehead University, confirmed that it was not murder, but tuberculosis and other infectious diseases that killed the great majority of IRS aboriginal children.

Reason for deaths

Prior to the 1950s, death rates among children in IRS schools were appallingly high — far higher than for non-aboriginal school children. By today’s standards, many IRS schools were poorly constructed, poorly ventilated, and seriously overcrowded with children who were living on an inadequate diet. But were the churches primarily responsible for these serious shortcomings? Not at all. It was the federal government that paid for the construction of the IRS schools and set their annual operating budgets.

Would the Indigenous children who died at a residential school have been more likely to survive if they had remained at home with their parents? Probably not. Up to the middle of the 20th century, death rates on Indian reserves were also appallingly high. According to the Final Report of the TRC, “For Aboriginal children, the relocation to residential schools was generally no healthier than their homes had been on the reserve.”

Why were so many children who died in a residential school not sent home to their parents for a decent burial? According to Hamilton, the federal government usually refused to pay the costs of transporting the bodies of these children to their parental homes and the churches could not afford to do so on their own, especially in the many cases where the parents of a deceased child lived on a remote reserve with no access by rail or road.

What about the allegations of rampant physical and sexual abuse in the church-run residential schools? Certainly, such horrendous crimes did occur. In its Final Report, the TRC disclosed that it had “identified over forty successful convictions of former residential school staff members who sexually or physically abused students.” The crimes committed by these perverts cannot be too harshly condemned. But note the total number: Just over 40 in a system that cared for at least 150,000 children.

The Independent Assessment Process (IAP) describes itself as “a claimant-centered, non-adversarial, out-of-court process for the resolution of claims of sexual abuse, serious physical abuse, and other wrongful acts suffered at Indian Residential Schools.” On its final report on March 11, the IAP disclosed that it had “resolved 38,276 claims and awarded more than $3.23 billion in compensation to residential school survivors.”

How, though, is it that just over 40 IRS staff members are known to have been convicted of serious physical or sexual abuse, yet the IAP identified more than 38,000 victims? Perhaps, the RCMP and the various provincial police forces were grossly derelict. Or could it be that a great many former IRS students took advantage of the IAP’s “non-adversarial, out-of-court process” to fabricate claims of sexual abuse that could entitle them to as much as $275,000 each in compensation from the federal treasury?

Don’t call it ‘genocide’

Note also the IAP’s use of the term “residential school survivors.” The TRC and the mainstream media also commonly denote former IRS students as “survivors.” That terminology is false and inflammatory.

To designate every former IRS student as a survivor belies the experiences of the many former IRS students who retain fond memories of their time at an IRS. (Tomson Highway, the eminent Cree playwright, and Len Marchand, the first person of First Nations status to serve in Parliament and the federal cabinet, are two prominent examples.) The term ‘survivor’ for a former IRS student also denigrates the truly appalling suffering of the genuine, Jewish and non-Jewish survivors of the horrendous Nazi death camps.

At least, the TRC refrained from explicitly accusing the Christians who ran the church-run Indian residential schools of mass murder. Instead, the TRC contends that they conducted, “a conscious policy of cultural genocide.”

That is outrageous and preposterous. According to the distinguished Canadian demographer Anatole Romaniuc, the Indigenous peoples of North America were not only illiterate, but still living in the late stone age at first contact with Europeans at the beginning of the 17th century. “Stone axes, digging sticks or hoes with blades made from shell were the tools used in agriculture and housekeeping,” Romaniuc explained. “There was no practical application of the wheel to transportation or manufacturing.”

Combined with nearly constant inter-tribal warfare, such primitive technology contributed to frequent famines and death by starvation. While no precise population figures are available, Romaniuc estimated that the total Indigenous population at the beginning of the 17th century on the vast territories of what later became Canada was probably only about 300,000.

Once these Indigenous peoples came into contact with European traders, the impact on their traditional cultures was virtually immediate and transformative. William T. Hagan, author of a standard textbook, American Indians, cites the cultural revolution among the Plains Indians generated by their eager acquisition of muskets, metal tools and horses: “An entirely new pattern of life developed that shaped everything from sacred stories and ceremonies to social games, artistic traditions, foodways, and gender roles.”

The introduction of alcohol and communicable diseases by Europeans in the 17th century was particularly catastrophic. However, it is indisputable that all the culture-transforming and life-destroying consequences of European contact had already had a revolutionary impact on the stone-age cultures of the Indigenous peoples of North America long before the first residential schools for Indigenous children were established in the 19th century.

Consider also that it is not just the Indigenous peoples of North America who have undergone radical cultural change. Numerous other peoples have had to endure no less difficult and prolonged transformations. The black slaves of North America are one obvious example. In Conquest and Culture, Thomas Sowell cites how the Roman invasion of England led by Julius Caesar radically transformed the lives and culture of the comparatively primitive Britons, whom the Romans habitually denigrated as barbarians.

Today, even the fiercest IRS critics would have to concede that, in many respects, the educational impact of the IRS system was hugely beneficial. Who can imagine that IRS graduates would have been better off if they had never had an opportunity to learn to read, write and speak English?

No doubt, the church-run Indian residential schools were in some ways seriously deficient. For the most part, schools in the IRS system failed to help Indigenous students to retain their ancestral languages and to appreciate what remained of the benign aspects of their traditional cultures.

Anti-Christian animus

For many, if not most, IRS critics, the primary focus of their ire is the teaching of religion and morality. On July 8, the Globe and Mail, published “Will accountability ever come in the Catholic Church and the Canadian government” by columnist Tanya Talaga. She charged: “One of the most devastating things the Catholic Church stole from Indigenous Peoples was our spirituality – our ability to maintain the teachings of thousands of years, It is hard to believe that the Church could think that God was on its side when it stole 150,000 children and tried to erase who they were.”

Feel the rage. To secular zealots in the mass media, it is inconceivable that anyone can reasonably believe in the Gospel of Christ.

On one point, Talaga is undoubtedly right: Church-run residential schools should not have indoctrinated Indigenous children in the Christian faith without the consent of the children’s parents. That was wrong. And it is no less wrong today for government-financed schools to indoctrinate children in the regnant secular ideology over strenuous objections by Christian parents.

Leaders of the churches who ran Indian residential schools on behalf of the federal government have sincerely apologized time and again for the failings of those schools. No amount of additional contrition by Pope Frances or any other Christian will appease the rage of implacable IRS critics.

Among secular zealots, Talaga is typical in focusing her ire on the Catholic Church. She makes no mention of the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Churches that also ran residential schools for the federal government.

Her selective condemnation of the Catholic Church is readily understandable, given that the Anglican, Presbyterian, and United Churches have all renounced the traditional teachings of their own denominations that conflict with what currently passes for progressive secular morality. With rare exceptions, it is only faithful, theologically orthodox, Catholics and Evangelicals who still uphold the plain teachings of Sacred Scripture that abortion is wrong, that euthanasia is wrong, and that marriage is the voluntary union for life between a man and a woman.

Secular zealots cannot abide authentic Christian teaching. They hate the Catholic Church and the Evangelical churches. It is this ungodly hatred of faithful Christians that fuels both extremist rage over the church-run Indian Residential Schools and the incineration of Catholic churches.

In the face of the intense and growing secular, anti-Christian animosity should Christians respond in kind? Obviously not. The admonition of Our Lord is clear: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them that despitefully use you and abuse you.”