It featured American political commentator David Frum discussing settler colonialism, defined as a term "often used as an accusation against Canada."
According to Paikin, Frum drew attention to doubts about alleged deaths at residential schools:
“The allegation that hundreds and thousands were done to death has been accepted as a fact,” Frum said, adding that the House of Commons unanimously passed a resolution equating the residential-school system with genocide.
... To be clear, Frum isn’t justifying “the horrifying numbers” in which Indigenous people died after first contact with “European colonial settlers.” He pointed out that, throughout history, different groups have conquered lands, then redrawn borders and redistributed the wealth, as they felt entitled to do.
Paikin reports that Frum called for "a battlefield of ideas." However, no indigenous spokespeople seem to have been invited to join in this discussion, nor anyone familiar with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report or its statistics on death rates at residential schools.
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| American residential school children |
Update, December 22: Meanwhile more material to rationalize away somehow: the Washington Post conducted its own count of indigenous burials at residential schools in the United States: 3100 and counting.
I don't have a Post subscription, so I'm linking to a summary and long quotation at Lawyers, Guns and Money.
