The executive summary is 270 pages long. It’s accompanied by a 638-page document titled “Upholding Sacred Obligations” and her previously completed 256-page study titled “Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience,” and that just about wraps it up for Kimberly Murray, the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools.
With her two-year stint at an end, Murray tabled her reports with Justice Minister Arif Virani on Tuesday. There’s a lot to digest in all this, but a couple of things immediately stand out.
The first is that it’s almost as though we’re back to the beginning again, in 1998, when the federal government set up the $350 million Indigenous led Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Some of what Murray proposes sounds a lot like a replication of that effort, with its focus on the legacy of physical and sexual abuse suffered in those institutions and the inter-generational impacts of the schools. Some of Murray’s recommendations, which she prefers to call “obligations,” almost exactly replicate the calls to action from the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But more noticeably, Murray’s trilogy reads too much like a jargon-jumbled critical theory dissertation and syllabus on “settler colonialism,” the dead-end ideology that imagines Canada, Israel, the United States and Australia as irredeemably illegitimate settler states locked in perpetual systems of capitalism, patriarchy, genocide, misogyny, racism, oppression, and heteronormativity.
At least Murray is straightforward about it. The term “settler colonialism” appears 89 times in her final submissions. She name checks the critical-theory big shots, like Judith Butler, who’s probably best known outside the faculty lounges for her 2006 declaration that Hamas and Hezbollah are “social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left.”
As with Butler’s view of Palestinians, Murray writes that Indigenous deaths are “ungrievable” in Canada. Lesser-known pseuds like settler-colonialism wizard Patrick Wolfe, author of such riveting page-turners as Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, also get a look-in.
This might go some distance to explain why one of Murray’s key recommendations would require Canada to submit itself for prosecution before the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, on the grounds that many of the children enrolled at residential schools down through years are not just missing but are rather the victims of “enforced disappearance.”
It’s not clear just how many Indigenous children from the residential schools era died after their enrolment and it’s not clear how many are missing, or rather were “disappeared,” or where they are buried. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s researchers put the number at roughly 3,200. Others have suggested the figure is much higher. But are they disappeared, or even missing? In March, 2023, Murray told the Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous People: “The children aren’t missing; they’re buried in the cemeteries. They’re missing because the families were never told where they’re buried.”
This is the gnawing wound at the heart of Canada’s residential schools debates, which Murray is very keen to police and patrol. It’s not just the Canadian state that owes reparations. “Media organizations must make reparations for their role in supporting settler colonialism and by denying and limiting truths about the Indian Residential School System,” Murray concludes.
Newsrooms should investigate their past complicity in mass human rights violations against Indigenous people, perform audits and studies of their coverage of Indigenous affairs, issue apologies, develop “ethical standards for trauma-informed reporting” and undertake any other such reparations measures as identified in consultation with Indigenous people, Murray says.
To further guard against the boogeyman of “residential schools denialism,” an abstraction that presumes to describe any downplaying of the genocidal nature of the schools, Murray adds her voice to the New Democratic Party’s proposal to situate skepticism of certain commonplace claims about the schools in the same section of the Criminal Code that outlaws Holocaust denial. The proposal is also supported by Justice Minister Virani. It’s not clear whether his cabinet colleagues are completely onside.
The Online Harms Act, Bill C-63, should also be amended to “address the harms associated with denialism” about the schools, and about missing and disappeared children and unmarked burials, Murray says. These strictures would be difficult to enforce, to say the least, and not just because of the freedom of speech provisions in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
During a spasm of national hysteria, riots and church burnings and desecrations that erupted in May, 2021 after the reported discovery of a “mass grave” in an apple orchard at the long-shuttered Kamloops residential school, the crime of “denialism” was widely alleged against any public notice that in fact no such thing had been discovered.
The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc had said nothing about a “mass grave” to begin with, having referred instead to 215 burials, and the Tk’emlups leaders themselves have since “downplayed” the ground-penetrating radar results to encounters with “anomalies” below the soil surface.
But it was the Kamloops imbroglio and a series of similarly misreported “discoveries” in the following months that led to Murray’s appointment. That’s when the trajectory of federal residential-schools policy remedies took an especially sinister turn.
After the 1998 Aboriginal Healing Foundation launch and the Conservative Harper government’s formal apology for the schools legacy, the $5 billion Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) of 2007 also launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The $60 million TRC process ended with a report in December, 2015 that included dozens of “calls to action,” notably proposing the identification, documentation, commemoration, and protection of long-forgotten cemeteries associated with the residential schools. By the time of the Kamloops eruption six years later, the Trudeau government had only spent $7 million of the $33.8 million set aside for the work. After the Kamloops story blew up, everything went into high gear. As of March of this year, $216 million had gone towards “survivor-centric” projects to locate and document gravesites, and commemorate the children whose bodies lie buried in them.
Last year, a federal court judge approved a further $2.8-billion in a settlement agreement between the federal government and 325 First Nation communities whose members attended the schools, to compensate for losses of language and culture. Also last year, the federal court approved $23.3 billion to compensate for underfunding the First Nations Child and Family Services program.
Just what Murray anticipates on top of this remains to be seen, but reparations would be just one subject overseen by her proposed 20-year “Commission of Investigation into Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials.” But it would be serious and costly work.
“The circumstances leading to the need to locate and identify the missing and disappeared children and unmarked burials cannot be understood in isolation. They are evidence of one of the most horrific elements of genocide—the systematic and violent targeting of Indigenous children in settler colonial Canada as part of the colonization process.”
The federal government must provide “full reparations, including compensation, to families of the missing and disappeared children, including their living descendants,” says Murray.
Among other things, Murray envisions her new Commission of Investigation seeing to it that Ottawa patrols public speech by “tracking the dissemination of disinformation and misinformation about Indian Residential Schools, missing and disappeared children and unmarked graves and burial sites.” Ottawa should also regulate search engines and social media firms to “immediately remove the dissemination of misinformation, disinformation, and falsehoods” about residential schools, “missing and disappeared children,” and unmarked graves and burial sites.
Virani has yet to comment on the “obligations” Murray expects Ottawa to fulfill.
National Post