Michael Higgins: There’s no justice in jailing people for residential school ‘denialism’

First Nations leaders including Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Garrison Settee hold a news conference in Winnipeg over the naming of a street. Photo by Dave Baxter/Local Journalism Initiative/Winnipeg Sun

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Five years after the Kamloops “graves” controversy first erupted, and with zero bodies discovered, First Nations chiefs are pushing hard to make residential school denialism an imprisonable offence.

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But Canadians should not have to face up to two years in jail for denying what the chiefs describe as their “truth.” Are we only to speak about the horrors of residential schools, or will survivors with “warm memories” face prison?

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Or could it be that the push to criminalize denialism is an attempt to stop legitimate discussion about the presence of unmarked graves at the Kamloops former residential school? If so, then a denialism law isn’t so much to protect the truth as it is to stifle debate, restrict free speech and impose on everyone a narrative written and dictated by Indigenous leaders.

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In the spring, Nunavut Sen. Nancy Karetak-Lindell tried to amend the Liberals’ anti-hate law, Bill C-9, to include residential school denialism. This would have made it illegal for anyone to engage in the “condoning, denying or downplaying” of residential schools, with a proposed maximum penalty of two years’ imprisonment.

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Thankfully, a vote by the whole Senate threw out the amendment.

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This wasn’t the first time a parliamentarian had tried to criminalize residential school denialism: NDP MP Leah Gazan tabled a similar bill in 2024, which never made it past first reading.

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But on Wednesday, First Nations chiefs gathered at a press conference to once again push for a law that would criminalize denialism. The issue of Kamloops cropped up repeatedly, and while no one said it outright, the implication appears to be that denying that there are bodies at that particular former residential school amounts to denialism and should, therefore, be a crime.

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Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak Grand Chief Garrison Settee said he recently went to Kamloops. “I went to the sacred site where 215 anomalies were found. As my chief said: crime scene…. This is genocide. Not only cultural genocide. It is genocide, to try and get rid of a people deliberately.”

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It is worthy of note that Settee talked of “215 anomalies” and not graves.

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At the same press conference, B.C. Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee referred to the 215 “findings” at a “grave site” in Kamloops.

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If this kind of careful language had been used at the start of the Kamloops controversy, we would be having a very different public conversation.

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Instead, in 2021, it was Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir who said in a statement that ground-penetrating radar had confirmed “the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”

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“Some were as young as three years old,” she added.

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This led to the explosive and inaccurate headline in The New York Times: ‘Horrible History’: Mass Grave of Indigenous Children Reported in Canada.