How to counter residential school denialism

In today’s Big Story podcast, as awful as the legacy of Canada’s residential schools is, there are some in this country who don’t want to believe it. In recent months, this has led to a rise in attempts to use linguistic missteps on the part of journalists or Indigenous leaders to ‘expose’ what minimizers claim is a lack of proof that thousands of children died at these schools.

Niigaan Sinclair is a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, he wrote about residential school denialism for The Tyee.

“If you had a crime that was perpetrated, you would want to hear from the victims of that crime … But in the case of denialists they’re saying we know better than those who have firsthand experience,” says Sinclair.

So how do the searches at the school sites work? What, precisely, has been found there? And if we know there are remains in the ground, why haven’t more of them been exhumed?

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