While Indigenous communities have long known about deaths at residential schools and the existence of unmarked burial sites, for much of Canada’s history, the residential school system was left unscrutinised.
“Canada normalized the disappearances, deaths and unmarked burials of Indigenous children for well over a century on a scale that is indefensible,” said Murray, the special interlocutor, in her final report (PDF) last year.
Eva Jewell, the head of research at the Indigenous-led Yellowhead Institute, said the feeling of normalisation was prevalent even among residents of her community, the Chippewas of the Thames First Nation in southwestern Ontario.
Chippewas of the Thames was home to one of the country’s first residential schools, Mount Elgin Industrial School.
“It was for a long time just kind of seen as what was necessary to happen to us, in order for us to fit in with this dominant society,” she told Al Jazeera of the residential school system.
But that view began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, when former students started speaking out about their experiences with the advent of therapy, Jewell explained.
Then, in the 1990s, groups of survivors filed lawsuits against the Canadian government to demand reparations for what they had endured, culminating in the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement of 2006.
The largest class-action settlement in Canada’s history, the agreement ushered in what Jewell describes as “the apology era”.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) – born out of the settlement agreement – was launched in 2007, and a year later, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologised for residential schools in the House of Commons.
In 2015, after hearing from more than 6,500 witnesses – including survivors – over six years, the TRC said in its final report (PDF) that the residential school system “was an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide”.
“Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world,” it said.
Just months after the TRC released its report, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party won federal elections on a promise to make truth and reconciliation with Indigenous people one of its top priorities.
“We have to acknowledge the truth: Residential schools were a reality, a tragedy, that existed here in our country and we have to own up to it,” the prime minister said days after Tk’emlups te Secwepemc located the unmarked graves in Kamloops in 2021.
That June, amid international and domestic outcry, the Trudeau government completed three of the TRC’s “Calls to Action”, including the creation of a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Yet Murray, the special interlocutor, said in her report that there has been “systemic failure to document the historical and ongoing genocide of Indigenous Peoples within Canada, including the failure to educate Canadians about this aspect of Canada’s national history”.
This “continues to create conditions where denialism can flourish”, she warned.
According to Jewell, the idea underpinning residential school denialism – “that Indigenous peoples are in the first place unworthy of being sovereign peoples” – also remains firmly embedded in the fabric of Canada.
“We actually, historically speaking, have only had a very small window of time where there was an acceptance that residential schools were a harmful practice,” she told Al Jazeera.
“Reconciliation was never strong enough … in the Canadian public consciousness for us to even be saying that denialism is on the rise. It was more like reconciliation was on the rise, and now it’s fading out,” Jewell said.
“Canadians need to remember that. Reconciliation is not who they are. Denialism is who they are.”
