Tainted Testimonies Mean No Truth and No Reconciliation

Eye witness testimony is not reliable

By Michelle Stirling ©2024

“Sugarcane” is a new National Geographic documentary that critics are raving about. It’s the story of the Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia, and their on-going search for the children they claim went missing or are buried in unmarked graves at the St. Joseph’s Mission/Indian Residential School (also known as Cariboo Indian Residential School). The “Sugarcane” filmmakers claim to have ferreted out long-hidden, but whispered, truths about illicit pregnancies of female students, impregnated by priests, and unwanted babies disposed of in the school’s incinerator. Those are some of the more gut-punching themes.

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One of the more dramatic moments in the new documentary “Sugarcane” is when Rick Gilbert, former chief of the Williams Lake First Nation, meets with Louis Lougen, Superior General of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate at the Vatican. He was invited, as part of a group, to hear an apology from the Pope.

Rick is a devout Catholic. Somehow he finds the strength within to confess, on camera, to Louis Lougen that his mother was abused by a priest and thus Rick exists. His eyes fill with tears and Louis Lougen’s face reflects the immense spiritual blow of this confession.

But is it true?

No. Very unlikely. Rick Gilbert’s mother Agatha was 18 years old when she gave birth to Rick on Oct. 11, 1946. Rick’s mother was not a student at St. Joseph’s Mission/Indian Residential School, the focal point of the documentary “Sugarcane.” Students could only attend until they were 16 years old.

Perhaps Rick was tearing up because he had a gut-feeling he was bearing false witness. To a priest. At the Vatican. Perhaps relentless badgering about his DNA profile which had been shown earlier on in the film, defining his heritage as 45% Indigenous, 5% Scottish and 50% Irish, had finally convinced him that the filmmakers and Indigenous activists must be right, when in his heart, he knew they must be wrong.

The demographic mix of Williams Lake back in the 1950’s was predominantly English, Irish and Scottish; any of the thousands of handsome, hard-working men who poured into this land of opportunity could have been his father. Likewise, his mother subsequently had children with different men. But his mother was married in 1946. To his father.

Maybe he was tearing up, thinking about his mother Agatha… how she was knifed to death in 1965, at a drunken brawl after a funeral in the home of Williams Lake Chief Willie Sellars’ grandmother, Martha Sellars. His mother was only 37. Rick would have been about 19 years old by then. His mother’s 20-year-old cousin, Winnifred Lila Sellars, was charged with murder, but acquitted.

Rick Gilbert's legal father survived Rick's mother, so any relationships Rick's mother had later on after giving birth to him (by which she apparently produced 8 more children) were relationships she entered into while her legal husband was still alive

Or maybe Rick was wondering how and why she’d been implicated in a murder in 1962 with her paramour (or common law partner, albeit her husband was still living), Howard Malcolm Stine, along with Agatha’s mother, Clothilde, the grandmother who raised Rick.

Rick had been mostly raised by his grandmother Clothilde, a common phenomenon in Indigenous communities when the young parents are struggling with alcohol and domestic violence. But based on these news stories, it seems his family was part of a rough neighbourhood.

Rick attended St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. Rick picked up fiddle playing and a love of music. In “Sugarcane” he states that he deeply respected the elders who are faithful Catholics. He seemed calm and grounded in his faith – was he tormented into making this awkward public confession by persistent nudging from the investigative journalist, Emily Kassie, who says she lived with Rick and his wife Anna for two weeks while they worked on the film? Rick passed away in September of 2023, a few months before the release of the film “Sugarcane.”

There is no prior record of Rick Gilbert ever suggesting that he was abused or the illicit love-child of a priest, nor any record of him suggesting that he himself had been abused at the school which he also publicly confessed to Louis Lougen. Indeed, this “Find a Grave” site says Rick’s mother and father were married in 1946 and that his father was Edward George Gilbert, a WWII vet, a fact which Rick acknowledged and honored in 2020 on Remembrance Day.

Was his testimony tainted by the leading questions of non-professional investigators Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing? They held group witnessing sessions where people told personal stories, some with wildly lurid details; none backed-up with documented evidence. Such a context tends to “create memories” – rather like in the days of Satanic Panic.

Eye witness statements are very convincing. In a group setting, people tend to agree, and others will jump on board. This creates what is called a ‘social proof’ – a term coined by psychologist Robert Cialdini, a psychologist and the ‘godfather of influence and persuasion.’ But in legal terms, eye-witness claims are simply not very reliable, especially when referencing Historic Sexual Assaults, historic events, or childhood memories. That’s according to the American Psychological Association.

If you watch the 1991 CBC “Fifth Estate” documentary about St. Joseph’s Mission, the same place that “Sugarcane” focusses on, you will see for yourself the deplorable poverty of those living on reserve. You will hear one of the Oblate fathers sent to work with the locals saying that there were bootleggers everywhere; everyone was drunk all the time.

Indeed, by 1987, one of the local towns of Alkali Lake was said to have 100% alcoholic residents, children included. It was nick-named “Alcohol Lake.” With heroic determination, starting with just one couple, the town weaned itself off alcohol, but lots of damage was done along the way to the village of 486 people, as reported in the LA Times in 1987.

The Shuswap Indians of Alkali Lake came by their abstinence the hard way: Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, the alcoholism rate here was 100%, and when recovery did come, it involved a sort of house-to-house combat with booze.

“It was continuous drinking,” said Francis Johnson, a 40-year-old recovering alcoholic who now teaches fourth through seventh grade at the village school. “Because of the drinking, there was a lot of child neglect, wife abuse, rape, gang rape--the worst kind of things you can imagine.”

Charlene Belleau, one of the investigators in “Sugarcane” was Chief of Alkali Lake Band for three years. She spoke at the handing out the acting awards to community members at the end of “The Honor of All” – a documentary re-enactment of just how the band members became sober. The actors were all the real people, re-enacting their turn toward sobriety for the cameras.

In CBC’s 1991 Fifth Estate program, a rare statement from Lena Paul, a former residential school student at St. Joseph’s says the school was a lifesaver.

CBC voice over: “Lena Paul is one former student with fond memories of Saint Joseph's school. To her, residential school meant salvation.”

Lena Paul: “I had a really good experience when I was at the residential school because with… with the chaos and the violence that was going on in my home when I came to the to the residential school it was some place it was clean, it was some place that was sober and I always knew what was going to be happening next because it was very structured and orderly there and for me it was a place that I felt safe.”

Also in the 1991 CBC Fifth Estate show, former Chief Bev Sellars, tells us that it was a rumor that priests impregnated girls at the school. Now 33 years later, it is claimed as fact by “Sugarcane.”

Alan Fry’s book “How A People Die” is a documentary novel about the unimaginable social, economic and moral conditions that some Indigenous people lived in on reserve in the 1950’s with much of the novel echoing the statement of Francis Johnson’s about Alkali Lake.

Thus, how much of what we are being told in “Sugarcane” or in the recollections enshrined in the Truth and Reconciliation documents are accurate stories about the lives of children at Indian Residential Schools? How much is projection or transference from chaotic lives on reserve prior to their attendance at schools, or false memories? How much is social compliance, or a product of coercion in the nepotistic context of reserve life?

How much of it is tainted by the many years of lawyers going fishing for class action claim clients? How much of it is tainted by the Individual Assessment Process (IAP) paid as part of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement? Some $1.2 billion had been paid out by 2012; hearings continued into 2017. In the IAP, you got more money if your claims of sexual, physical and emotional abuse were more complex and more humiliating – with sums often into the area of $200,000 as compensation; meanwhile, your accused was offered a paltry $2,000 to try and defend their good name. There was no evidentiary process such as cross-examination involved, ostensibly not to retraumatize persons who had truly suffered harms.

But one must question the ballooning payments. The forms with leading questions. The lack of legal due process.

And one must wonder if having legions of lawyers sending lists of potential harms for class action clients to sign on to “free of charge” – lists that asked which body parts had been fondled or penetrated, how many times/how frequently – how has that abused-victim-chasing by lawyers tainted testimonies?

Likewise, to what extent may Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder or Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome or the effects of Tuberculosis have had on the more lurid claims of people like William Combes – a central figure in Kevin Annett’s documentary which has been seen by millions of people.

Annett is a defrocked United Church minister who championed the claims of Indigenous genocide and who befriended the down-and-out like street alcoholic William Combes and then documented their claims. Frances Widdowson debunked his claims in “Billy Remembers” in the book “Grave Error,” but many people still cling to his stories as ‘truth.’

Again, though many of Combes’ claims are bizarre and have been proven wrong, for many people, his on-camera personal testimony is convincing.

But like the American Psychological Association states, convincing does not mean it is reliable.

Combes was a life-long alcoholic and died of Tuberculosis.

Both conditions can result in hallucinations.

In “Sugarcane” there is an individual who tells the investigative team that, as a child at St. Joseph’s, he witnessed a nun with a shoebox; the lid fell off and he saw that there was a baby inside, and then she threw the box in the school’s furnace.

These are extraordinary claims.

However, no one in the media is able to question the claims or to question this individual as the filmmakers say:

“That was his testimony,” said Kassie. “He’s the only living witness, so we don’t have testimony from anyone else. He is reclusive and lives very far off grid. He has suffered quite a lot from the trauma of what he has seen.”

She adds, “We held back on particular details.”

Since the filmmakers also withheld the detail that students could only attend Indian Residential Schools until they were 16 years old back then, and they also soft-pedalled details about the role of alcohol in the lives of participants in the film – which often will disqualify a person from being deemed a suitable witness in a court of law – there is no way to confirm this person’s story.

But, you may argue, a documentary is not a court of law.

Correct.

It is the court of public opinion, and presently, public opinion is being formed by hundreds of film critics in their reviews that Roman Catholic priests impregnated Indigenous girls at St. Joseph’s and then they and their co-conspirator nuns, burned unwanted babies in the schools incinerator. This is a blood libel for which there is no such evidence. The ‘evidence’ is these recollections, prompted with leading questions, and the film’s contrived interweaving of a true story of one baby’s abandonment by its own mother, in the school incinerator, and another the true story that one priest did break his vows and fathered a child with a 22-year-old Indigenous employee of the school. But she was an adult. Not a student.

It is quite likely the more outrageous stories in the film are false memories. People in group witnessing sessions often ‘go along to get along’ as shown in the Asch Conformity experiment.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has turned into a circus of never-ending lurid blood libels against Roman Catholics, Christians and Canadian history. The truth is now nothing but tainted testimonies that will wreck-a-silly-nation with orange hair shirts and self-destructive media beatings with a cat-of-nine-tales.

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