The federal probe on Indigenous missing children and unmarked graves, the final report of which was released last Tuesday, does touch on the topic of residential schools. Mostly, though, it’s a 1,300-page tome that sets out arguments against the Canadian state.
And because it’s so long and full of filler, few people will ever read the thing to appreciate its absurdity. Even the executive summary, at an undigestible length of nearly 300 pages, defeats its own purpose. Canadians, this $10.4-million essay project isn’t for you. It’s for governments and lawyers to use as support for future billion-dollar payouts and future arguments in court for more colonial concessions.
The special interlocutor who authored this report, Kimberly Murray, never outright states that Canada has no right to exist. She instead talks around it by laying out various lines of logic supported by citations to decolonial scholars throughout hundreds of pages which, if taken together, seem to conclude that reconciliation will only be achieved when Canadian sovereignty is extinguished.
It starts with Murray’s concept of nationhood: Canada, to her, seems to be a colonial blanket atop a bedrock of Indigenous fundamental rights. “Where Treaties were signed, Indigenous Nations agreed to share their lands with settlers, and where no Treaties exist, they have never ceded their sovereignty over their homelands. In either case, they have never relinquished their right of self-determination to the Canadian State.”
It’s not true. For the Canadian state to exist as a sovereign country, it must hold that fundamental title to the land. That land was either settled upon, traded for (that some Indigenous groups in treaty negotiations didn’t have a concept of property rights in land, or only rudimentary ones, doesn’t make the trade illegitimate), or otherwise conquered. If Indigenous groups wanted to re-assert sovereignty, they could fight or trade; though, these are unattractive and costly.
Murray’s own methodology presumes Canada’s illegitimacy: she takes an “anti-colonial” approach that recognizes the “inherent sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples.” Colonialism, she says, is a distinctly European phenomenon, a convenient categorization that saves her from the mess of excusing away the Chinese and Moroccan genera. Colony nations (those spawned from Europe, at least) only achieve sovereignty by “removing or undermining the sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples and replacing it with colonial claims to the lands and waters.”
Today, countries like Canada “have not fully decolonized because they continue to assume and assert sovereignty over Indigenous Peoples and lands.” Logically then, full decolonization can only happen when nations like Canada no longer assert sovereignty over their current lands and Indigenous citizens.
Canadian sovereignty, in this report, goes on to be the fundamental element of anti-Indigenous genocide. That’s because genocide, Murray claims, manifests through just about every interaction between state and subject: through mistreatment, neglect and destruction of identity, as well as through the “failure to educate Canadians about this aspect of Canada’s national history,” the “breach of Indigenous laws” and the lack “educational and punitive measures (such as implementing hate crime provisions in the Criminal Code) to counter denialism.”
On one hand, Canadian sovereignty, the foundation for our laws, is bad; on the other hand, a lack of imposing more of these laws adds to a “pattern of genocide.”
It’s a contradiction that plays out again and again in Murray’s report. Children were “systemically” disappeared, she says. She does establish that Indigenous children were moved around within the health and residential school systems, and that poor administration gave rise to incomplete paper trails. She also establishes that some gravesites were not maintained long-term, leading to gravesites being forgotten and sometimes sold, when they should have been commemorated.
But from there, she goes on to blame the state for carrying out “enforced disappearances” by underfunding programs and staffing ranks with neglectful bureaucrats — a “crime” that continues today — and then exempting itself from wrongdoing later. As if limitations periods and Crown immunity for certain state actions were added as malicious tools of genocide, and not age-old features of our legal system.
Other instances of mistreatment are similarly exaggerated. Murray identifies cases of Indigenous residential school students being used for unethical research on malnutrition during the 1940s and 1950s, which were objectively terrible: various vitamin-deficient children were given diets and supplements to test whether they worked, all while the state underfunded the schools’ food budgets and restricted proactive dental care.
But Murray goes on to insist this amounted to a crime against humanity, on par with Cambodian Khmer Rouge executioners and Rwandan mass rape enablers. She actually compares the malnutrition studies to Japan’s Unit 731, which experimented on Chinese prisoners with unsedated vivisection, limb amputation (and sometimes re-attachment to other prisoners) and forced pregnancy and deliberate infection (to study in-vitro disease transmission).
“In these cases, much like in the context of the medical experiments against Indigenous children, there is a common rationalization that States rely on to evade accountability for these atrocities: the experiments are necessary to support scientific and medical ‘progress,’” she writes. It’s true that many experimenters of Unit 731 infuriatingly walked free after postwar negotiations despite deserving at least life in prison and probably execution, but their utter cruelty is incomparable to what unfolded in Canada.
Canada, to add, has issued numerous rounds of compensation for state injustices within residential schools: the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement has paid out $3 billion as of 2019. And when it comes to more recent grievances — namely those relating to Indigenous children in care or otherwise received insufficient state support from the 1990s into the 20th century — Canada has recently agreed to a $40 billion settlement agreement. That’s about 50 per cent more than the last year’s Department of National Defence budget, but it’s still not enough.
As for more payback, Murray’s wishlist is long.
She wants to bring in the International Criminal Court to investigate Canada and possibly prosecute government officials for “enforced disappearances.”
She also wants “long-term, sustainable, flexible” funding to repatriate bodies in graves which have yet to be found — more of it, that is.
“In alignment with Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty, the federal government must support the Survivors, Indigenous families, and communities who are leading or wish to lead, these investigations, without interference or intimidation,” she writes. As of March, $217 million has gone towards the grave search; no bodies have been recovered.
She also asks that Canada support the “rematriation” of lands that contain or possibly contain graves — that is, facilitate land back with a spiritual component. Elsewhere, it’s implied that this requires abandonment of Crown lands: Crown land as a concept is “a foundational obstacle to rematriation because it upholds the Doctrine of Discovery, and, currently, there is no Canadian legal pathway to resume full jurisdiction and governance authority over Indigenous lands.”
Murray also has instructions for how Canada deals with its non-Indigenous population, ranging from criminal and civil penalties for deniers, to the state’s “rewriting of national history.”
“With the rise of denialism relating to the missing and disappeared children and unmarked burials, the need to develop historically literate citizens is more urgent than ever,” she writes.
“Creating a more truthful and inclusive national history to counter the denialism of settler amnesty and impunity requires acknowledging that genocide and mass human rights violations against Indigenous Peoples are part of Canada’s history.”
She characterizes the historic rewrite as if dreaming up a propaganda campaign: she implores schools and higher education for even more curriculum additions; she commends some Canadians’ willingness to “unlearning a settler colonial version of history”; she calls on historians to “inoculate the citizenry against the spread of denialism”; she suggests “Regulating online providers to create better mechanisms to promptly remove denialist materials once they are identified and reduce their spread.”
The umbrella term for the push for the above changes? “Memory activism.”
Oh, and if this re-education campaign makes anyone feel bad, even their emotions need adjustment.
“Non-Indigenous people must understand that, in settler colonial contexts, empathy has functioned as a means of social control to maintain the colonial status quo…. Developing an anti-colonial ethics of care requires settlers to actively engage with, and decolonize, deeply embedded colonial forms of empathy.”
Criminal sanction, Murray maintains, must remain an option for punishing deniers — that is, anyone who denies the “intent, outcomes, and impacts” of the schools. She handwaves concerns about free expression: “laws criminalizing negationism are not penalizing a particular interpretation of history or upholding a single authoritative version; rather, they address the deliberate falsification of history in service to a political or ideological agenda informed by hatred and/or discrimination.”
But Murray doesn’t stop there: she goes as far as asserting that Canadians and the Canadian government should be subject to Indigenous law, which itself is a legally dubious concept that often exaggerates tribal conventions into the equivalent of England’s common law and the French civil code:
“Indigenous Nations are responsible for making decisions and controlling processes according to their own distinctive laws and legal relationships with their territories, kin, and other beings. Non-Indigenous governments and people are responsible for understanding, accepting, and following these laws as they apply to them, and this includes Canada.”
Whatever you think of it, it certainly doesn’t bind Canadians in reality — we’re subject to the laws of Canada, a sovereign nation that sets its rules according to a democratic process.
Big picture-wise, Murray isn’t just asking for more money and state benefits. Her arguments point to the withdrawal of the Canadian state from Indigenous bubbles of sovereignty, which currently exist only in the minds of decolonial scholar-activists — or permanent compensation for occupying these (again, fictional) bubbles of sovereignty. If you read her words carefully, you’ll find there is no end-point to the genocide she claims is ongoing. Genocide is a product of the interaction between the colonial state and its Indigenous subjects, which means the demand for concessions will never end. What’s demanded is an endless stream of tribute payments.
She probably won’t get it right away. But don’t be surprised when the special interlocutor’s final report becomes a much-cited footnote used to support future “evidence-based” acts of decolonization.
National Post