Canada’s Darkest Secret –

the Myth of Missing Children at Indian Residential Schools

By Michelle Stirling ©2025

The words “truth and reconciliation” conjure up feelings of courage, honesty, transparency and ultimate relief of a fraught and conflicted relationship. In Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has achieved the exact opposite result.

AI generated image licensed from Adobe Stock. Representative of most Canadians today.

The most glaring example is one that most people don’t know about. I discovered it while reading Ronald Niezen’s book.

Excerpts of Niezen’s book.

Niezen is an interesting character. A law professor and anthropologist, he blends his first-hand knowledge of indigenous people with both a legal and anthropological view. As far as I know, his book “Truth & Indignation” is the only critical review of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Indian Residential Schools, that was written during the TRC process. It is the only book I have found so far that includes some interviews with the accused – the priests, nuns, clergy and former government employees of Indian Residential Schools. It recognizes that they were cruelly cut out of the process. Many of these people had dedicated their lives in service to Indigenous children and their communities.

It should be noted that although $100,000 was allotted from the $60 million TRC budget for recording and transcribing interviews with former priests, nuns, clergy and employees of Indian Residential Schools, this budget was summarily cut to $10,000 and the researchers were told their work would not be transcribed.

Niezen records how a handful of individuals – some Indigenous, some clerics – attempted to present a positive picture of their experience at Indian Residential Schools at the TRC public sessions, but they were quickly shouted down.

He also notes that many former priests or workers were afraid to testify – some afraid for their safety or their lives.

Why? Had their crimes been so heinous? Had they ever been convicted in a court of law?

No. They had been convicted in the Kangaroo Court of the residential schools’ Independent Assessment Process (IAP), some years before.

Until I recently met a victim of this Kangaroo Court, and read Niezen’s book, I was under the impression that the IAP had operated as a thoughtful, evidence-based legal process. I knew it had a protective framework that did not require the alleged victim to have to publicly testify and bear that emotional burden of reliving the trauma. But I thought there was due process of law. I knew that the IAP assessment might receive complaints that were criminal in nature, but that it was not structured to prosecute. I assumed the IAP included some form of amnesty, forgiveness or public rapprochement, albeit in an intimate setting with a handful of legal authorities, adjudicators and support people to help make things right, rather than in a public courtroom with media seeking lurid headlines. I was wrong!

From the IAP Adjudication Secretariat (http://www.iap-pei.ca/former-ancien/iap/hearings-eng.php ) :

“The standard track is used for dealing with claims of abuse. Most IAP claims are dealt with in this track. Claims under the standard track are less complex because claimants must prove their claims solely on a balance of probabilities. That means the adjudicator makes a decision based on whether it is more likely than not that the abuse happened.” (See section titled “Three Different Tracks”)

“For most residential school abuse claims, the only evidence of what happened is the testimony of the claimant. There are rarely any witnesses or other evidence available to help claimants prove their abuse claims.” (See “Providing Your Testimony at Your Hearing”).

So, it was a ‘she said…’ war of words, without even a ‘he said…’ component.

The late Dene Inuvik Chief Cece Hodgson-McCauley was one of a few prominent Indigenous with the courage to speak truth about the IAP scam. “Those [ten years I spent at residential school] were the best years of my life. My family says the same thing, my sister swears by it. We were treated wonderfully…They’re only reporting the bad side, and the more you lie, the more you say it’s bad the more money you make, and the lawyers are making money because they’re pushing people to tell their stories.”

Isn’t ‘reconciliation’ about confronting, confessing, explaining past wrongs, real or perceived, then with that public witnessing and suitable compensation, some kind of settlement of issues comes to pass between the aggrieved and the accused?

Turns out, if anything, the IAP process amplified feelings of vengeance and injustice for both parties.

Let me explain.

My contact told me they received a letter from the IAP explaining that they were named as a “Person of Interest” in a complaint by a former residential school student.

My contact went to a lawyer who flatly told them this would be a Kangaroo Court, not to bother fighting or participating; just let it be.

Though this did not sit well with my Catholic contact, who is an advocate for the truth, who truly loved the years spent teaching at an Indian residential school and who held their former students in high regard, they took the advice of the lawyer.

The first time.

The second time.

By the time a third letter of accusation arrived, they returned to the lawyer, who again told them to ignore it, as there was no resolution in a Kangaroo Court.

My contact felt this was not right. So, they decided to attend.

The process was unbelievably skewed.

A former Indian Residential School student could lodge a written complaint with the IAP – it could be very short, a paragraph, and no substantiating evidence was required.

Niezen reports that the government contracted 17 private investigation firms to track down some 5,315 alleged abusers, including former employees and students (there is a well-documented history of student-on-student physical and sexual abuse in several schools). Only 708 of these alleged abusers agreed to participate in the IAP hearings.

It seems clear in Niezen’s book that he accepts the views of the 2000 Law Commission report that found that children in such institutions were at the mercy of pederasts and sadists, in a context with little outside supervision. However, unlike the other carceral institutions noted in that report, the evidence in Indian Residential School records shows that there was a steady flow of Department of Indian Affairs inspectors, doctors, nurses, dentists and visits from family members. There was a LOT of outside supervision and interaction at Indian Residential Schools, unlike many other cloistered institutions mentioned in the Law Commission report.

In my research, I do acknowledge that in more cloistered facilities, like polio hospitals or TB sanatoriums, having one pederast on staff could mean that children were at their mercy with no escape, sometimes for years.

However, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission only cites some 31 perpetrators who were convicted and served time or faced other consequences for their offences over the course of 113 years in 139 schools across Canada. Indigenous activists will claim that this small number is due to lapses by the governmental and legal system; supporters of the Indian Residential School system will say that these findings show that the priests, nuns, clergy, Indigenous teachers/workers and others were overall decent individuals, totally dedicated to the care of their small charges.

No matter the claim, Canadian rule of law and the UN Declaration of Human Rights dictates a requirement for evidence-based decisions in a court of law, meaning a public trial of due process is required to ascertain anyone’s alleged guilt.

While one wishes the number of offenders at Indian Residential Schools was ZERO, on balance it seems that Canadian IRS were not the sexual predator hell-holes promulgated in the press. Critics will say that this just shows not all the bad perps were caught – supporters of Indian Residential Schools will say that this shows there were not many perps and they were caught and punished at the time!

Most of those priests, nuns, clergy and lay staff who offered their service to Indian Residential Schools did so out of a Christian dedication to uplift Indigenous communities that suffered from a lack of education and enlightenment, and which faced challenges in life. Many Indian Residential School principals and religious servants faced extreme personal hardships which they endured in silence for years; if their goal had been sexual interference, any city slum would have offered hundreds of options with no risk of penalty.

I will not be abbreviating Person of Interest to POI in this article, as I want you to remember this was a person – someone who could have been you.

The IAP would send a letter to the Person of Interest, telling them that they had been named as such and informed of the allegation against them, advising the Person of Interest that they could attend the adjudication if they so chose. The Person of Interest could also send back a rebuttal to the charges, if so desired, though as we will see, it meant nothing.

The government offered to pay for the Person of Interest expenses for travel, hotel and meals, psychological counselling, a ‘comfort’ person and other incremental expenses, as well as $2,500 for a lawyer, if they so desired. (Tell me, since when do governments pay all such expenses of an accused?)

An adjudication date was established.

So, my contact went to the session. At the session my contact discovered that the Person of Interest, who in a real court of law would be deemed a ‘defendant’ was ascribed the title of ‘witness.’ As a ‘witness’ they were not allowed to offer a defence or a counter argument to the claim against them. Likewise, the accuser was not required to be present, and no accuser was present at any of the many adjudications my contact attended. Nor was the ‘witness’ allowed to know what the complainant was paid.

The adjudicator did not assess the case based on evidence, but rather on probabilities.

Thus, as Niezen writes in his book, in one case a priest was accused of sexual assault of a young man and the accuser was awarded $100,000 – based on the adjudicator’s probability assessment that the young man was likely at that school, and it was possible that such an assault could have happened. Except that this particular priest was still at theological college and nowhere near the school. Such an assault, based on the evidence, could never have happened.

As the IAP did not follow due process or evidence-based law, we now have on record the names of some ~5,315 Persons of Interest. “In the over 13 years since the signing of the IRSSA, the IAP held 26,707 claimant hearings, issued 27,846 awards, and awarded $3.233 billion in compensation.”[1]

People who have not read Niezen’s book, thus assume that these ~5,315 people are guilty of crimes and that they were not prosecuted for these crimes, as if they got off scot-free! Even those who have read Niezen’s book may tacitly accept his view of the 2000 Law Commission Report which stated that children at various institutions were subject to ‘pederasts and sadists’ and he seems to accept the trope that children at Indian Residential Schools were ‘incarcerated’… by their own parents?!

I suspect Raymond Frogner, Chief Archivist of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) is one of those people who assume the guilt of ~5,315 Canadians identified as Persons of Interest in the IAP process. In several webinars, Frogner seems to be determined to find the ‘missing evidence’ from files that do not exist for crimes that were likely never committed. The same goes for Kimberly Murray, former Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves Related to Indian Residential Schools. Her reports reflect a similar bent – demanding ‘justice’ when in fact the IRSSA, from which the IAP and the Truth and Reconciliation process were born, was specifically not designed to pursue criminal action; the point was to settle via compensation! Sadly, the IAP process that preceded the TRC created theoretical criminals of thousands of Canada based on an adjudicator’s ‘probability,’ but no evidence. And now people claim the TRC found not only ‘cultural genocide’ via the public statements, it has escalated to claims of actual genocide.

This is a key point Niezen makes about the actual Holocaust genocide convictions versus the TRC process. He points out that the genocide finding of the Jewish Holocaust by Nazis was based strictly on material evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. He writes that though the Nuremberg Trials were “not a truth commission as we know it…the prosecutors explicitly wanted to avoid testimony from victims of the Holocaust and to prosecute Nazi officials solely on the basis of the material evidence, which they had in abundance.” (pg. 167)

Canada’s TRC process was the opposite, primarily based on victim statements of the aggrieved, with positive statements of former students and staff intentionally excluded. Evidence was thus cherry-picked to support a ‘cultural’ genocide claim, which quickly morphed into accusations of an actual physical genocide by activist academics like Andrew Woolford and Sean Carleton of the University of Manitoba, NDP MP Leah Gazan, several Senators, Kimberly Murray, and most journalists.

Likewise, Niezen notes that unlike the many other truth and reconciliation processes held to heal various conflicts around the world, Canada’s TRC is the only one that exclusively focussed on the victimization of children. For the public, this heightened the sense of a great moral harm. Niezen notes that the public sharing nature of the TRC meetings is inimical to ‘historical truth’ because, citing psychologist and author Don Spence, “the memory becomes a bribe; the more it sparkles, the more it seems to fill a narrative niche, the more likely it to be made of fool’s gold.”

Thus, in contrast to other such commissions, where the despicable and tragic events were within the proximity of a few years or a decade, where evidence, identity of perpetrators, available witnesses and documented facts were relatively easy to be verified, the TRC’s focus on children meant “the distance in time between the violence of it and the narration was unusually long and based upon childhood memories.” (pg. 5)

Eyewitness statements are always very compelling, but as police, lawyers, judges and psychologists can tell you, they are not reliable, and become less so over time, especially concerning Historic Sexual Assault. Memory is malleable. Children do not make good eyewitnesses, especially if their narratives, as adults, have been molded by decades of class action lawyers offering them lurid suggestions to obtain larger compensation. Likewise, people have been exposed to media stories highlighting only the worst events and conflating unrelated contexts, such as US Catholic sex scandals.

It is notable that Andrew Woolford of the University of Manitoba hosted an international genocide conference in Winnipeg in 2014 and actively proliferated the notion of an Canadian Indigenous genocide across social media in advance of the event. His thesis is that since children were ‘forcibly separated’ from their families, Indian Residential Schools thus constitute genocide under the Geneva convention Article II (e). Indeed, one of the main criticisms of the TRC reports by historian JR Miller is that: “At no time in the history of residential schooling in Canada were parents “compelled to send their children to residential schools.””[2]

Though Woolford claims he is a criminologist, he fails to accept that there has never been a genocide charge or conviction against any person in Canada related to Indian Residential Schools. Under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 10 and 11, all persons are entitled to a fair trial and to be deemed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But Woolford condemned his own countrymen and women of genocide, when no such evidence exists.

And the IAP and TRC violated these Universal Human Rights as well.

The original goals of the Indian Residential School system were to provide education, literacy and acculturation of Indigenous children, so that they could be active participants in mainstream society. Contrary to the claim “we were targeted for annihilation” reported in Niezen’s book, remaining as illiterate hunter-gatherers would have side-lined indigenous people to living off the land in the bush. Teaching children necessary skills in the residential schools where they were enrolled by their parents is not genocide, no matter how activists spin it.

Woolford writes of his genocide conference: “One goal of the conference organizers was to create opportunities for Indigenous scholars, leaders, and community members to contribute to and direct our discussions. This began prior to the conference by making sure that the conference was well-advertized on websites, listservs and through Facebook groups frequented by local Indigenous peoples. We were also fortunate that a reporter featured our conference in a local newspaper prior to our opening. Mary Agnes Welch framed her Winnipeg Free Press article around the question of genocide in Canada, and featured comments from several of our presenters, including Charlene Bearhead, Trina Cooper-Bolam, and David MacDonald.”[3]

Today, if one questions the ‘genocide’ narrative, as ‘proof,’ people are told ‘just read what people said in the TRC reports’ – but they are not told that most of those aggrieved who spoke at the TRC were also party to decades of lawyers priming them, leading the witness, and ginning up business for legal cases, of which some 11,000 had been filed by October of 2002 according to Niezen (pg. 42). On Aug. 5, 2005, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) launched a class action seeking $12 billion in general damages, $12 billion in special damages (etc) and $12 billion in punitive damages. These ultimately led to the multi-billion-dollar Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), which in turn led to the TRC. It should be noted that the Canadian Indian Residential School issues became conflated in the public mind and in those of lawyers and the aggrieved with the Boston Globe reporting in 2003, of a high-profile, major Catholic clergy sex scandal, subsequently made into the movie “Spotlight.” The American ‘jackpot justice’ method of dispensing legal resolutions undoubtedly caught the eyes of Canadian lawyers and Indigenous activists as well.

It is curious, for example, that in 1993, Charlene Belleau, a key figure in the documentary “Sugarcane” testified to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples that she had a good experience at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, which took her in after she was orphaned when her father rolled his vehicle. “Dead from drinking,” as she later put it, in statements to the press. Curiously, by 2021, Charlene was claiming in “Sugarcane” that dozens of ‘disappeared’ children had been fathered by priests at the school and the babies incinerated to hide the crime. National Geographic picked up “Sugarcane” for distribution for a price in the ‘low seven figures.’ One has to wonder what caused the dramatic change in her tune. Was it the $8.6 million that Williams Lake First Nation received from Canadian taxpayers to find missing children and unmarked graves?

According to the report issued by Williams Lake First Nation[4] on Sept. 27, 2024, no unmarked graves or missing children have been identified. There is still no list of names of missing persons. However, the year prior, BC taxpayers ponied up $800,000 for Williams Lake First Nation so that they, the alleged victims of heinous crimes, could take sole ownership and manage access to that as yet uninvestigated crime scene.[5] Remember, the claims in “Sugarcane” are sex crimes with minors and infanticide! Why is the place not swarming with cops?

In 2008, Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard issued their book “Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry”[6] which was well received at the time. “By examining the root causes of aboriginal problems, Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard expose the industry that has grown up around land claim settlements, showing that aboriginal policy development over the past thirty years has been manipulated by non-aboriginal lawyers and consultants.”

Thus, as of this year, for 47 years, the aboriginal industry has been cashing in on real and manufactured grievances, the TRC being a fiscal, moral/public perception and public relations victory, elements of which Niezen highlights in his book.

Dr. Widdowson, a tenured professor at Mount Royal University, was subsequently illegally terminated from her position on Dec. 20, 2021, for continuing to share her truths online.

Are all claims false?

My contact Person of Interest admits there is an iota of truth to some of the IAP claims, in most cases these were minor ‘offences’ to a person and not civil or criminal offenses at the time. These would include practical guardian interactions with a child such as forcing a child to take castor oil as part of a health routine or forcing a juvenile to stop chewing tobacco. These thoughtful (though unpleasant) acts, done then to protect the child, are today magnified by presentism, ambulance-chasing lawyers, and the promise of thousands of dollars in compensation, and are turned into a criminal act such as ‘forcing me to drink a toxic substance’ or ‘denying my personal rights’ by making the student spit out the chewing tobacco.

People often express outrage that I question the various lurid stories told – especially like those in “Sugarcane” – the Oscar nominated documentary. How can I be so cruel? I invite them to read the 2006 Maclean’s magazine article[7] about how ambulance-chasing lawyers, one of whom planned to make $100 million in fees, have been putting crazy ideas in aboriginal people’s heads for 50 years, promising huge compensation if they just fill out the form as to how they were abused, and offering helpful, graphic suggestions.

Niezen does note that in many cases, individuals who truly had suffered trauma and abuse were so overcome by emotion, they were not able to fill out the IAP claim form without help. So, obviously there are real victims. But there are also many well-off lawyers. And sadly, Niezen’s 2^nd edition touches on the fact that many survivors were either triggered by their experience and had damaging emotional relapses, while others celebrated the windfall of cash with an enhanced level of consumption of alcohol, fentanyl or, as one person put it “…now I can afford cocaine.”

There are likely some cases where it is true that a true perp walked away from IAP, based on the scenarios. But many innocent people were accused by a dozen or more IAP claimants, largely because the ambulance-chasing lawyers encouraged clients to sign up friends and family. After all, it was like a harmless lotto – buy a ticket with a small entry fee to the lawyer, fill out the form with heinous claims, and like the game of Monopoly, Pass “GO” and collect your $200,000!

The truth of this community-wide sign-on is reflected in the fact that many of the allegations lodged seemed to be copycat in nature, my contact Person of Interest said. There was no normative trial where the Person of Interest could face the accuser in court, and no evidence was reviewed from both sides as would have been done in a court of law to prove the allegation beyond a reasonable doubt. Thus, it is far more likely that ~5,315 people have been falsely accused or accused of crimes that are wildly exaggerated by ambulance-chasing lawyers who have been cashing in on the aboriginal community for the past 50 years.

So, after years of such humiliation, such indignity, such a breach of rule of law and obviation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, very few former school priests, nuns, clergy or government workers wanted to engage in another session of public humiliation at the TRC hearings.

Thus, as former student Tomson Highway wrote in 2015,[8] the only thing we heard from the TRC were the 7,000 sad stories, not the 7,000 good stories. Niezen noted in his book that there were about 86,000 former residential school students alive today (at that time of publication in 2017). The TRC comments represent only about 4% of all students who ever attended.

The TRC was skewed. And Canada is screwed because of it.

Similarly, returning to my opening screenshots from Niezen’s book (2^nd edition), the Missing Children story was developed in secret. As Niezen writes, people were invited to give oral testimony at a booth run by a forensic anthropologist at TRC events. Recall that those speaking were offering recollections of school days 50 or 60 years ago, when they were under 16 years of age. At that age, what people see and understand is ‘as a child.’ The fact that a classmate ‘disappeared’ one day at school because they were sent off to a hospital, sanatorium or reform school doesn’t mean that something nefarious happened. It means that the adults made a decision to protect the child, or to protect other children from the child, if s/he was violent or unruly.

The notion of ‘missing children’ seems to be deeply rooted in the activities of Kimberly Murray and the Mohawk Mothers. In a sworn affidavit regarding the importance of continuing a search for graves of alleged ‘missing children’ at McGill in Quebec, Murray also claimed to have written most of the TRC reports herself.[9] She went on to be appointed “Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves Related to Indian Residential Schools” and issued three subsequent reports, each more strident and historically skewed than the last.

There has been much talk of foreign interference in Canada in the past few years, yet no one seems to have noticed that Kimberly Murray’s office was located on land which is marked by a sign saying, “You are no longer in Canada.” Niezen mentions several times in his book that the intent of the TRC was to cause national shame, and perhaps he's right. One has to wonder why the Canadian government contracted a one-woman show, operating from some “Kanata – repatriated sovereign Mohawk Land” unnamed nation, to write and ride shotgun on all these important proceedings.

Image licensed from Almay

Canada has been cowed and almost conquered by national shame, in part by the 2015 release of the TRC reports, but most certainly since the May 27, 2021, false claim that made headlines around the world – that the human remains of 215 missing children had been found in the apple orchard by the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. I say this claim is false as no human remains have been found, and the Kamloops Band itself announced last year that they were reflecting on the ‘anomalies’ found – a far cry from graves, bodies, or human remains.

Though the Kamloops claim occurred years after Niezen’s 2017 publication the die had been cast with the sacralisation of the martyred TRC victims, reified through the ceremonial traditions of each TRC public session.

Still, the question remains. Did children go ‘missing’ or did they just move on?

In some cases, that ‘missing’ child reached the legal age of 16 years old, the mandatory age of leaving residential school, and they opted to move on. They simply went on with their own life, got a job, travelled, married elsewhere, joined the military, and just never came back home.

It should be recalled that enrollment of status Indian children reached a peak of roughly one-third during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and was far lower throughout most of the previous four and a half decades and subsequent four decades. About another one third of the children went to day schools on reserve (returning home at night) and another third did not go to any school at all. Thus, within the group of kids at home who had not experienced residential school themselves, the absence of a local child would have been subject to all kinds of rumors and local gossip.

The fact is that some children did die at Indian Residential Schools, 423 according to the TRC reports, over 113 years and 139 schools. In most cases their bodies were returned home for burial on reserve, as written on their death certificates, and that would have been fodder for local gossip, too. Others, suffering from an incurable stage of Tuberculosis would also have been sent home. “Consumption” as it was called then, literally consumed the body, leaving a weak skeletal coughing frame, remnant of a human being, whose final end was often a bloodied fit of coughing, adding to the horror and the assumption that the school inflicted this torture on the child.

However, Tuberculosis was a global scourge until the late 1940s and the advent of vaccines, streptomycin, much improved public sanitation (flush toilets vs outhouses, hot and cold running water, much improved soaps and cleaning materials/disinfectants).

One must remember, most of these Indigenous communities served by Indian Residential Schools were very small, probably under 500 people. So, everyone knew everyone – but, as explained, not everyone was exposed to formal schooling. Likewise, Tuberculosis infection rates on reserve were extremely high due to communal living conditions but in the early days, TB was rampant and the leading cause of death in Canada in all strata of society.

Despite everyone knowing everyone on reserve, there is still no list of names of missing students and no collection of unresolved missing persons reports. Advocates who claim that ‘thousands’ of children went missing, or that there was a genocide, can’t explain why no families can produce a birth certificate or picture of a student whose fate is unknown. All of the schools required a formal application for enrollment signed by a parent (or a guardian if the child was orphaned or from a destitute or neglectful family). That application was approved in Ottawa at the Department of Indian Affairs. The schools received financial payment for each student’s support, and they operated on razor thin margins, therefore, it was not in their interests to have any students ‘disappear’ – let alone thousands of them.

Not to mention, until the 1960’s, most schools were run by Christian orders who observed and taught the Ten Commandments – one of those being “Thou shalt not kill.”

After the 1960’s, the government of Canada took over the schools and several Indian Bands themselves successfully petitioned to run the regional residential school. This means that ‘genocidaires’ are accusing Indigenous Bands of brutalizing and murdering their own children. Does that make any sense to you?

My Person of Interest contact informed me that there was only one priest and a ‘kitchen nun’ on site as religious figures when they taught and lived at the school. The school was otherwise run by Indigenous teachers, ward supervisors, an infirmary nurse, and there was a non-Indigenous handyman.

Niezen points out that in one compensation case, the judge decreed that the Canadian government bore 75% responsibility in the case, the church only 25%.

Yet it is the churches and clergy who are being denigrated and smeared and threatened; the churches burned down, not government buildings and not the Band Council building of reserves where the Indian band itself ran the school!

This is all happening because of secretive TRC meetings over missing children, a topic that was never part of the original mandate of the TRC. Now, in conjunction with the performative method of witnessing of the TRC that was webcast around the world, the stories have morphed into making Canada a genocidal pariah on the global stage.

Canada’s biggest crime was trying to offer people who were living a subsistence hunter-gatherer lifestyle, people with no written language, a way into the agro-industrial world, a leap of 5,000 years of history, engineering, literature, and culture. Canada succeeded, as virtually all Indigenous people I see are capable with cellphones, driving cars, using credit and debit cards, speaking English or French, many operate businesses, work in the skilled trades and many are highly skilled professionals. Many more are actively flying around the world to various kinds of conferences on human rights. Most of that is funded by Canadian taxpayers.

Source: International Funders for Indigenous Peoples 9^th Annual Report

In this regard, for the former hunter-gatherers, non-Indigenous Canadian taxpayers are now their prey, aided and abetted by rapacious lawyers and foreign funding in some cases. Non-Indigenous Canadians stand, like deer in the high-powered spotlight of a night hunter, afraid to speak up about how things have gone awry in case we upset the process of ‘reconciliation.’

Wreck-a-silly-nation.

Good hunters admire an agile prey and feel cheated by those that don’t cleverly run or won’t fight. No wonder resentment runs high on all sides. Truth and Indignation. A great way to destroy a once great nation.

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[1] Independent Assessment Process Oversight Committee 2021 pg. 8

[2] https://bcstudies.arts.ubc.ca/book_film_review/the-final-report-of-the-truth-and-reconciliation-commission-of-canada-volumes-1-6/

[3] Unsettling Genocide Studies at the Eleventh Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, July 16-19, 2014, Winnipeg-Canada

[4] https://issuu.com/williamslakefirstnation/docs/wlfn_sjmi_interim_report_final_digital_1_

[5] https://globalnews.ca/news/9939776/williams-lake-first-nation-owner-residential-school-grounds/

[6] https://www.mqup.ca/disrobing-the-aboriginal-industry-products-9780773534216.php

[7] https://macleans.ca/news/canada/white-mans-windfall-a-profile-of-tony-merchant/

[8] https://www.huffpost.com/archive/ca/entry/tomson-highway-has-a-surprisingly-positive-take-on-residential-s_n_8787638

[9] https://falconers.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Special-Interlocutor-Materials-Combined.pdf