Genocide and Geopolitics - Open Letter to the Honorable Minister Arif Virani and Gary Anandasangaree, Senator Brian Francis, Senator Margo Greenwood

RE: Kimberly Murray’s Testimony to the Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Peoples

Open Letter to the Honorable Ministers Arif Virani and Gary Anandasangaree, Senator Brian Francis, Senator Margo Greenwood

Cc:

International Criminal Court (ICC)

UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

UN Special Rapporteur on Rights of Indigenous Peoples

RE: Kimberly Murray’s Testimony to the Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Peoples and Murray’s final report as Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves related to Indian Residential Schools

Screenshot of the cover of the Executive Summary of the report discussed herein.

According to Kimberly Murray’s statements to the Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples of Nov. 27, 2024, Ms. Murray has submitted her “Final Report on the Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials in Canada,” not only to the Honorable Minister Virani, to whom she was contracted to consult as a civil servant to the Minister of Justice (originally David Lametti), but she has taken it upon herself to forward this unvetted report to international bodies, including the International Criminal Court and others such as those mentioned above (At 19:28:34 in the video).

1) Breach of Mandate. I believe this is outside her mandate as a civil servant and a breach of due process for a civil servant to distribute a consequential report, filled with heinous accusations, to outside, international agencies prior to a full and thorough review by Canadians.

2) Lack of fundamental evidence. The Canadian Senate issued a report with a critical issue identified by the Chief Medical Examiner of Manitoba:

“Not having the names of the children who are suspected to have died in the residential schools, we can’t focus our search to identify these particular files quickly.”

-Dr. John K. Younes, Chief Medical Examiner, Province of Manitoba

I ask the parties to whom this letter is addressed to request the following from Ms. Murray:

a) a list of names of children who alleged are missing or who were allegedly subject to ‘enforced disappearance’ before any other steps are taken.

b) the missing persons reports filed by family members over the 113 years of Indian Residential School operations.

c) to make this list of names and missing persons report public in Canada so that independent researchers can assist in finding the truth in the complex web of historical documents.

3) Canada has a functioning judiciary – as evidenced by Ms. Murray’s appointment, thus no International Criminal Court (ICC) intervention is appropriate. As stated on the International Criminal Court’s website: “The International Criminal Court (ICC) investigates and, where warranted, tries individuals charged with the gravest crimes of concern to the international community: genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. As a court of last resort, it seeks to complement, not replace, national Courts.”

Furthermore, as acknowledged by Ms. Murray in her statements to the Senate Committee, a previous request to review claims of genocide vis a vis Indian Residential Schools (based on the spurious, unproven statements by the Kamloops First Nation) by some 22 Canadian lawyers was already rejected by the ICC.

4) Canada has encouraged and underwritten the exposition of the statements of former students. Clearly, Canada’s national court system and judiciary are not at any stage of ‘last resort’ on the claims of missing children or other allegations of human rights violations or allegations of genocide regarding Indian Residential Schools. Canada has conducted a multi-million-dollar national process of hearing from former residential school students, resulting in the five-volume Truth and Reconciliation Reports (TRC) via the Commission, of which Ms. Murray was the Executive Director. Some ~6,500 former students provided their recollections, but there was no credible evidence of homicide, excepting one claim by Doris Young. The RCMP did look into this claim and did not find substantiating evidence. Likewise, though ~6,500 is a large number of former students, it is only 4% of all attendees over time. Subsequently, Ms. Murray was contracted by the Canadian government to conduct her past 2 ½ years of research into claims of missing Indigenous children. This process has taken years - yet Canadians have not even had a month to review Ms. Murray’s ~1,000 page report.

5) Canada has provided compensation with little requirement for an evidentiary process. Prior to the TRC, Canada also established the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) to settle various class action lawsuits, which has paid compensation in two-tiers – the first being a Common Experience Payment of $10,000 for the first year of Indian Residential School attendance and $3,000 for each year thereafter, whether or not the individual claimed harm was done or not while attending Indian Residential School. A second tier – the Individual Assessment Process (IAP) – provided substantially more compensation ranging into the six figures, if a person claiming harm could reasonably substantiate their school and the individual(s) involved in harm. This was not a judicial process in away way. There was no cross-examination of those who recounted their stories for the TRC and no evidentiary process was required for those claiming IAP. Thus, though many of the statements are compelling, they cannot be said to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Eye-witness statements are notoriously unreliable, according to the American Psychological Association and legal scholars.

6) Ignorance of Catholic and Christian rituals leads to historical misinterpretation. Ms. Murray’s final report and her report “Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience” suffer from ‘presentism’ (applying present values, standards, laws and mores to historic times) and ignorance of Christian, and particularly, Roman Catholic burial rituals and graveyard maintenance. In “Sites of Truth…” there are historic images of children in graveyards or of youth carrying a coffin, which Ms. Murray (a non-Catholic) misinterprets as a human rights violation. In Christian and Roman Catholicism, escorting the mortal remains of a loved to the grave is born of spiritual grace and is the final honor one can give; weeding and cleaning a graveyard is a sacred ritual to honor the dead and to hasten The Resurrection. The children in the photographs came from Catholic homes or of other Christian denominations. Their families had chosen Christianity decades prior; they would have approved of their children learning these essential sacred burial rites, as well as learning the necessity of proper burial for reasons of public health and sanitation. This was crucial knowledge for the general population up until about the 1950s when the Tuberculosis plague that killed millions finally was abated by modern medicines and vaccines.

Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience

Robert Carney was an eminent Canadian historian and is the father of the more famous Mark Carney, potentially the next prime minister of Canada, past governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada). Robert Carney outlined in his work, in some cases residential school was cheaper for the family and more secure for the children, and certainly a refuge for orphans. He wrote of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) “It would have been fair to acknowledge that many traditional [Indian Residential] boarding schools, in some cases well into the twentieth century, took in sick, dying, abandoned, orphaned, physically and mentally handicapped children, from newborns to late adolescents, as well as adults who asked for refuge and other forms of assistance.”

So unmarked graves with unidentified remains may indeed be found, but not for the nefarious reasons of ‘genocide’ and unrelated to the students of the schools.

One need only read this sad story in Eric Bays’ book, “Indian Residential Schools: Another Picture.” Bays explains that at the Hudson’s Bay trading post at Albany, a father who was a fur trader showed up in distress, saying there was no food in the family tent and that his wife was ill. The father then died. The Hudson’s Bay sent out men with food, only to find the family in a tent, the mother deceased with five children around her. A two-month-old baby was given up to a relative, the 16-year-old joined other relatives on a hunt, and the remaining three children, a boy and two girls, came to the residential school. During a flu epidemic, the youngest of the three died at the school.

This vignette is a repeating story through the history of Indian Residential Schools. Orphaned children. Families in distress. This also is an example of why many Indigenous people ‘know’ there are missing children from their communities — and why they feel certain the loss is directly associated with Indian Residential Schools.

Likewise, many children who were sent on to Tuberculosis sanatoriums, sometimes for months or years, returned home as ‘someone else’ - years later, as I explain in this July 28, 2021 essay “Unmarked or Mass Graves? Epidemic or Genocide? Some Historical Context on Canada’s Residential Schools.”

As Indigenous Catholic priest, Father Christino Bouvette explains, where ever people live, people die. Thus, a graveyard was necessary, especially in remote locations of Indian Residential Schools.

Some 500,000 Indigenous people in Canada identify as Catholics and some ~200,000 more as other denominations of Christianity. Ms. Murray’s divisive work has torn these people from their faith, driven wedges in their communities, and broken their hearts as their much-loved, century old historic churches have been burned to the ground by arsonists enraged at the unproven accusations made in the TRC and in Kimberly Murray’s other reports.

7) Continuation of unproven accusations leads to incitement: Ms. Murray’s reports and public statements have caused incitement against Christians, Roman Catholics, and historical Canadian figures. Since the claims of deaths and missing children by the Truth and Reconciliation Commissioners, starting in 2010, Blacklocks Reporter states that there have been over 400 incidents of arson and vandalism at Catholic and other Christian churches and facilities. Wild accusations of the discovery of 215 mass graves, human remains of children, and of three-year-olds buried by their six-year-old classmates were made against Canada by the Kamloops First Nation in 2021. This led to over 100 of such arsons and vandalism attacks. Despite the Kamloops First Nation now having stated in 2024 that these findings were ‘anomalies,’ at Ms. Murray’s public event where the final report was released prominently featured a drum labelled “215” poised by an empty chair. She continues to refer to the “215” as if fact of missing children, in her public statements and in her Senate testimony. Ms. Murray’s work is a violation of the United Nations Charter of Human Rights in that she has published criminally defamatory works against Canada and those who operated and staffed the Indian Residential Schools without due process. Though Ms. Murray was contracted to be an objective and impartial researcher, she has written in her documents and stated in public that she has no intention of being objective or impartial. This is a breach of her contract terms and the UN Charter of Human Rights.

Under the United Nations Charter of Human Rights:

Article 10

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11

Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

8) Indigenous Data Sovereignty is a flawed concept. Canadians paid for the documentation in the Library and Archives of Canada, and have paid for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation; all historic data must remain available to the public without restriction. In Senate testimony, Ms. Murray claimed that she’d recently spoken with the Williams Lake First Nation (WLFN) which was seeking funding for searching unmarked graves. In fact, WLFN was recently the subject of an award-winning documentary about their search for unmarked graves titled “Sugarcane.” Several members of the WLFN are featured in the documentary including their chief archeologist, Whitney Spearing, of the WLFN-owned enterprise “Sugarcane Archeology.” National Geographic has picked up the film for distribution, reportedly for a sum in the low seven figures. If anything, “Sugarcane” is an excellent example of why there must never be “Indigenous data sovereignty,” and why those questioning residential school claims must never be criminalized. The film conflates two true stories to make one big lie. It makes a ‘crime’ case that priests wantonly raped and impregnated students at the school and the unwanted babies are the ‘missing’ children and that the babies were incinerated at the school; that such rape and infanticide was systemic. “Sugarcane” just won “Best True Crime Documentary” at the Critics Choice Awards - even though the film is not true, and the true crime is the blood libel on Roman Catholics and Canada. Oddly, the WFLN archeologist, Whitney Spearing, goes along with the storyline, apparently unaware that cremation of a body requires high temperatures, beyond those of a school garbage-burner. If this ‘rez legend’ was true, it would mean that the Indigenous employees at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School are party to infanticide and mass murder of their own relatives. It seems unlikely that the many Indigenous staff there would have silently allowed any such heinous crimes to occur. Diligent research shows that far from a factual documentary, “Sugarcane” is a ‘shock-u-mentary’ fraught with omissions of key facts and filled with unfounded blood libels on the Roman Catholic Church and Canadian history. These are exposed in my mini-documentary “The Bitter Roots of Sugarcane” and the related discussion piece which includes the fact-check that National Geographic failed to do.

“The Bitter Roots of Sugarcane” on VIMEO:

9) Presentism rules over proper historical context. Many of the things Ms. Murray claims as “human rights violations” were societal norms at the time. For instance, in Senate testimony, she claims that having children engaged in “working out” was a form of child trafficking. In fact, “working out” constituted gaining practical work experience in a real setting at a farm or in a domestic situation [i.e. housekeeping]. These were the common options for entry level employment at that time in history. Ms. Murray’s “child trafficking” claim is a vastly misplaced form of presentism – an anachronism! In fact, “working out” was a form of today’s “practicum.” The objective of the Indian Residential Schools (especially the Industrial Schools) was to teach children real world skills for subsequent employment so that they could live independently. A similar process was part of the contemporary First Nations Training-to-Employment program in Alberta in the 2000’s where an industry partner agreed to take on Indigenous graduates of a pre-apprenticeship government funded hands-on training program in the trades for a six-week period of ‘test’ employment. If the person’s skill sets were good and if there was a good personality and work ethic fit, the company agreed to hire the person full-time. In this context, the persons involved were adults, however, in the time frame Ms. Murray refers to the “working out” the typical age of a working adult was about 14 years old; Indian Residential Schools limited attendance to age 16 because this was the age at which most young people became independent, income-earning workers.

10) Lack of appreciation that Indian Residential Schools were a lifeboat for orphaned children in a time of no social services. Ms. Murray, in her reports and public statements, has propagated the claim that children were ‘forced to attend.’ According to Department of Indian Affairs policies, parents had to formally apply to have their children enrolled in an Indian Residential School, the child had to pass a medical exam, and both were scrutinized and approved by the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. The age of enrollment was seven. An exception was made for children who had been orphaned, whose family was destitute, or dysfunctional.

Thus, even in the Senate, Senator Mary Jane McCallum reportedly went to Indian Residential School at age five. From this we can conclude that the school, which may have been forbidding, lonely and uncomfortable for her, may have saved her life as she would have been admitted under that exception. Clearly, with her distinguished medical career and social activism, Indian Residential School provided her with the essential basic education to go on and become a skilled professional, to provide excellent dental care to thousands of patients over her career, and now to play her role as a Senator.

Close up of the bottom of an enrollment application showing the parameters for admission.

Only one third of eligible Status Indians ever attended Indian Residential Schools. One third attended Indian Day Schools on reserve where they went home to their families every night. And one third did not attend any school at all. Ms. Murray speaks of Canada having ‘siloed’ settlement and compensation as if an intentional effort was made to prevent people from making claims when this is not what the evidence shows. Based on her world view, will the next class action be from individuals and descendants who did not choose to go to any Indian Residential or Day School at all? For having not had equitable access to the education that made Senator McCallum the capable, well-spoken woman that she is today?

11) In all of Kimberly Murray’s reports, the Forgotten Plague of Tuberculosis is overwritten by unsupported claims of genocide. Until the 1950’s, Tuberculosis was the greatest killer of all Canadians from every strata of society. Kimberly Murray attempts to make the case that children or youth who were sent to Tuberculosis (TB) Sanatoria or Indian hospitals were subject to ‘enforced disappearance.’ This is a ludicrous claim. During the height of the Tuberculosis plague, under the health act, police were authorized to remove persons infected or persons at risk (similar to during COVID when police were authorized to take extreme action to isolate potentially risky individuals) to save lives.

Google search AI summary of Canadian tuberculosis mortality rates

But when we review Kimberly Murray’s ~300-page executive summary, we find that genocide is mentioned 95 times versus Tuberculosis mentioned only 22 times.

Screenshots of word search in the Executive Summary

Ms. Murray, in her Senate testimony, called upon Indigenous law to be applied to resolve issues – that there was too much of the ‘ship’ side of the two-row wampum and not enough of the ‘canoe’ side. Based on the lack of evidentiary methods employed in the TRC and the subsequent reports by Ms. Murray, it would appear that far too much ‘canoe’ side was the norm and Canada is now all at sea without a paddle.

The fact that Ms. Murray took it upon herself to submit her unvetted report to the International Criminal Court and related international bodies creates a significant geopolitical challenge for Canada. People may have forgotten, but the day after UNDRIP attained Royal Assent, China and several despot nations, accused Canada of genocide at the UN, citing the Kamloops ‘mass grave’ claim as evidence.

With the current concerns about foreign interference in Canada, Ms. Murray’s actions should raise red flags for all Canadians.

Please consider this as a formal submission from me as an independent researcher, writer and filmmaker.

Sincerely,

Michelle Stirling

Alberta