The Globe and the Tk’emlúps "anomalies"

I was slow in giving a close read to the long story by Patrick White and Willow Fiddler about the Tk’emlúps Residential School and residential school denialism that the Globe and Mail published on May 22.  I think I was mostly put off by the Globe’s editorial on the matter, which seemed like straight-up encouragement to denialism.

But in the end it is a good piece of journalism. 

White and Fiddler make clear enough that apart from a few ill-chosen words, the Tk’emlúps leaders mostly spoke carefully in June 2021 about how the ground-penetrating radar showed anomalies that were suggestive of graves. The article also states clearly that there is no doubt about substantial numbers of children dying at residential schools (and their remains being undocumented). It cites Canadian government documentation back to the 1920s confirming the death rates. It notes cases like the Dunbow school in Alberta where flooding in 1996 exposed (and carried away) many skeletal remains.

That is, the story makes it plain there is very good reason to assume that the “anomalies” at the Kamloops site are exactly what everyone in 2021 assumed they were.  Journalists who understood that the anomalies could be taken as gravesites were not failing us when they drew plausible conclusions.

The article might have been more clear about a point of view I remember hearing in 2022:  that the Tk’emlúps people, while making it clear that they had no doubt what the anomalies meant, had no great need or inclination to dig up what they assumed to be the remains of their small friends and relatives for scientists to stick on a shelf in some research lab for a century or so, in the name of research. (It does at least cite one person calling such demands "morbid and unnecessary.")

The story makes it clear enough that Tk’emlúps provides no serious basis for denying or minimizing the crimes and tragedies of the residential school system, despite the denialists “bones or nothing happened” approach to reconciliation. As is said in the article:

“I think a lot of denialism’s roots go back to the fact that lots of these folks don’t want to acknowledge or face the fact that atrocities happened to children,” said Manny Jules, chief of Tk’emlúps through much of the 1980s and nineties.

The Globe’s editorial and self-criticism has given new fodder for denialists everywhere in their campaign to stop progress towards reconciliation. There is no reconciliation without truth, as the editorial says. But the fundamental truth remains: residential school kids died and were buried in unmarked graves at residential schools across the country.      

Book Notes: Carleton and Sinclair on Residential School Denialism

University of Manitoba Press announces a forthcoming title for September 2026: Truth before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism, edited by Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair.

Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair, along with a team of expert historians, educators, Survivors, archivists, and archeologists, analyze the genesis, methods, and consequences of denialism; push back on denialist claims; and highlight some of the primary sources and peer-reviewed scholarship that denialists ignore or misrepresent. Importantly, they also document the harms denialists have inflicted on Survivors and communities.

It's  a timely topic, it seems. British Columbia's The Tyee has a Emily Enns feature up on the topic, focussing mostly on denial actions around British Columbia and the West, but linking in some national organizations and                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     networks of retired academics. It doesn't mention Toronto's Canadian Institute for Historical Education, which began mostly to assert that John A Macdonald is blameless in all things indigenous and deserves more statues but has hosted residential school denial talks by Nigel Biggar and David Frum.  

Update, May 11: Molly Ungar comments:

The CIHE should re-name itself The Canadian Institute for Historical Gatekeeping.

 They might take it as a compliment.

Murray Sinclair

Mizanay Gheezhik, (Murray Sinclair) 1951-2024

Never met him. But I can't think of anyone who did more to change the sense of what indigenous history and culture mean and have meant and should mean.  Not just as the prime mover of the Truth and Reconciliation report (2015); in everything I heard of or from him

This month at Canada's History: Parks Canada on Canada's History

 

Features

THE UNSETTLED PAST

In a stature-toppling era, Parks Canada adapts its retelling of this country’s complex history. by Christopher Moore

This month, the August-September Canada's History leads with my article "The Unsettled Past," investigating how Parks Canada is seeking to shape a new narrative for Canadian history at its sites and plaques all over Canada.

Update, June 23: The full story is now available at the Canada's History website.

Parks Canada's historic sites agency, like other Canadian museums and historical institutions, was put under tough scrutiny by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC's 2025 report shone a painful spotlight on the pervasive neglect of Indigenous history and historical perspectives at Parks Canada's hundreds of sites and thousands of historic plaques, and it called for a fundamental reassessment. 

 And of course there was backlash.

Nearly a decade into that reassessment, I talked to Parks Canada historians and planners, to administrators, to Indigenous consultants, and also to the critics hotly opposed to what is happening to Canadian history at Parks Canada's sites. I think it's an important story, and a hopeful one too. Subscribe, and it should be in your mailbox already. (The online version will come along a little later.) It's a beautiful issue too: Parks Canada's sites photograph well, let us say.

Also in the issue: David Frank on child labour and neglect in New Brunswick; Sophie McGee on our tangled history with orcas; Nancy Payne's spectacular text-and-picture spread on historic lighthouses; and Enid Mallory exploring historic Yukon roads. The lead in the review section features Gerald Friesen's new and important The Honorable John Norquay, about the remarkable career of the 19th century Indigenous premier of Manitoba.  

And more. 

 

History of "woke"

Rick Salutin:

Conservative academic/journalist Andrew Potter catalogues in the substack The Line why he abhors design changes in the new passport: “The lengthy list of apologies for past transgressions; the acceptance of Canada as a genocidal state; allowing the country’s 150th anniversary to be turned into an orgy of national self-hatred; ordering the national flag to fly at half staff for an entire summer while blithely ignoring, for months, the factors that went into that decision; letting 24 Sussex turn into a ruin; the obscenely casual, almost sabotaging, attitude toward the appointment of a governor general; the general indifference to the Crown, the Royal Family, and what it symbolizes.”

A 20-something I know opines: “I love when he lists all the good stuff Trudeau’s done. As a Canadian nationalist I support every one.” (Try rereading that list with a positive tilt.)

I'm far from being a twenty-year old, but I'm with the kid on this one. It's depressing how often "History" is assumed to be on the side of the reactionaries. 

Meanwhile, Parks Canada is considering revisions to the texts of almost ten percent of the more than 2000 heritage plaques it maintains around the country. So, for instance, old plaques at fur trade posts will now give more recognition to the indigenous role in the trade. It's part of Parks Canada's response to Call to Action #79 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ("to develop a reconciliation framework for Canadian heritage and commemoration").  Frankly, it sounds like this could be routine maintenance anyway: how many historians would not consider reassessing things they wrote fifty years ago when they were being republished?

Yet people who should know better -- including a former Parks Canada VP, Heritage Conservation quoted in the article -- declare "a new woke perspective is being imposed on what was formerly an apolitical ... process."  Yeah, right.

I'm an old Parks hand myself (Historic Sites Branch, natch), and I've often noted Parks Canada's long held grasp of "commemoration, not celebration." The first of my (very few) ventures into drafting text for plaques was at Louisbourg, when a plaque about James Wolfe was being reviewed to make it a little less "Rule Britannia" in spirit.  Parks Canada, from administering sites like the Plains of Abraham (and Batoche) has long had opportunities to consider the pitfalls of picking sides, and it's good to know that process continues.

National Truth and Reconciliation Day: treaties and crowns

Today is National Truth and Reconciliation Day. It's important to acknowledge the residential school survivors, to salute the Orange Shirts that honour children who did not survive, and to consider again the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

At some point, treaty implementation will be understood as the key to the long future of reconciliation and to Indigenous-settler co-existence on the treaty territories (i.e., Canada).  And on that topic I was glad this morning to see the good counsel of Douglas Sanderson/Amo Binashii who is a law professor at the University of Toronto and a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation.  

The passing of Queen Elizabeth has brought into sharp focus the Crown’s relationship with Indigenous people in Canada.

The traditional thinking goes like this: Indigenous people signed treaties with the Crown, and the Crown is the monarch. Ergo, Canada’s Indigenous people have a special relationship with the monarch, now King Charles III, and he should be held to account for broken treaty promises.

But this is wrong in almost every respect.

Sanderson underlines that the treaty agreements bind the Crown, not Charles. In 1867 all treaty commitments previously accepted by British officialdom became the responsibility of Canada.

The current relationship between Indigenous people and the federal government – the true, modern-day embodiment of the Crown in Canada – is the result of conscious policy choices by successive Liberal and Conservative governments over the past 150 years.

A monarch isn’t to blame for any of this – we are. And it’s time for us to take responsibility.

Sanderson has other good sense to offer on what the treaty relationship consists of, and the difference between agreements actually made and written texts filed in Ottawa. But until we understand the profound (and welcome!) irrelevance of the British monarch to Canadian affairs, reconciliation is just another item on a long list of things we seem unable to deal with adequately. 

 

Tallying reconciliation

Eva Jewell, an indigenous sociologist, and historian Ian Mosby, both of the (newly renamed) Toronto Metropolitan University, have a strong piece in the Globe and Mail that draws on their annual report for the Yellowhead Institute on implementation progress on the 94 calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Or, rather, lack of action: they count 11 actions completed since 2015. And these have been "actions that require little in the way of structural change and are largely symbolic in nature."

One of the most telling failures on Canada’s part is that four of the legacy calls to action simply ask that meaningful benchmarks and annual reporting requirements be established in areas such as child welfare (Call No. 2), education (Call No. 9), health (Call No. 19) and justice (Call No. 30). None of these have been completed.

If Canada can’t even report the truth about the way Indigenous peoples are treated in this country, how can we ever expect it to make lasting and meaningful change?

Jewell and Mosby note that simply ticking off boxes on an implementation chart has significant limitations, given that action on some Calls would be much more transformational than others, but they intend to continue their annual reports. At least until someone else takes up the benchmarking called for.

Prize Watch: GG Awards in History; Canadian Historical Association Prizes

At the recent Governor-General's History Awards in Ottawa, Murray Sinclair, Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was awarded the Pierre Berton Award for "exceptional achievement in the exploring and sharing of Canadian history through popular media." Don't think of truth and reconciliation work as popular history?  Consider the argument in the citation.

 The combined work of Sinclair and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was monumental in scale and scope, having created unique historical archives that document the experiences of multiple generations of Indigenous people,” the award jury said in making its selection.

The records in their many forms give voice to grief and hurt, resilience and renewal. Furthermore, the commission’s work, with its ninety-four calls to action, has been crucial in revealing the need for a new national narrative. Sinclair’s articulation of that mission has helped to create a profound shift in many Canadians’ understandings of this country’s history, while also charting a path forward based on respect, reciprocity, and good relations.

The Governor General's History Awards, administered by Canada's National History Society, are presented in five categories: Teaching, Scholarly Research, Museums, and Community Programming, as well as the Berton for Popular Media.

The Awards were presented May 16. Canada's History has published a full list of recipients (listed as 2021 winners; the presentation was this month).  Here's the Winnipeg CTV story about Manitoban winners, which provided the quotation about Murray Sinclair. 

The Canadian Historical Association, meanwhile, has published the complete list of prizes awarded at its recent conference. The prize for the best work in Canadian history went to Benjamin Hoy for A Line of Blood and Dirt: Creating the Canada-United States Border Across Indigenous Lands.  The CHA prize doubles as the Governor General's Prize for Scholarly Research. Last year's CHA Prize winner, Brittany Luby, received her GG History honours this month; Hoy will get his invitation to Rideau Hall next spring. (Did I say this awards stuff is simple?)

Considering the Weakness and Strengths of Earlier Scholarship

At the Ormsby Review, J.R. Miller, the author of a shelf of authoritative works on indigenous-settler relations, reviews Royally Wronged, 

The book was commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada as a Truth and Reconciliation project, to examine the Society's dealings with indigenous peoples over its long history.  And since the Society lists Duncan Campbell Scott as one of its presidents, and its Transactions are full of nineteenth-century (and not only nineteenth-century) essays in history and anthropology featuring comfortable white men writing about primitive and disappearing indigenous races, it should seem they would have a lot to find.

Miller isn't buying a lot of what they offer.

The opening of Miller's essay mostly sets forth a lot of small errors and mis-statements he finds. But its later parts make a strong argument that the contributors express their own complacency and their own sense of comfortable superiority when they dismiss out of hand the work of all the early anthropologists and historians who attempted, even in their own blinkered ways, to document and preserve what they could of societies and cultures that Canada was doing its best to extinguish.

Many of the authors who contributed to Royally Wronged do not understand earlier literature about Indigenous people or the scholarly context in which it was produced. Dr. Ian Wereley, for example, provides a list of papers focused on Indigenous peoples given at the RSC’s annual meeting and dismisses them as demonstrating “mixtures of curiosity and contempt” (p. 40). One of those presentations was an 1895 paper on “An Iroquois Condoling Council” by the eminent early anthropologist Horatio Hale. The rituals of condoling a group for losses to death and of requickening, or recognizing a successor to someone deceased, were central to Haudenosaunee governance, and over time the ceremonies came to constitute the format within which all Six Nations diplomacy took place. The casual dismissal of Hale’s “An Iroquois Condoling Council” is symptomatic of the lack of awareness of the significance of earlier scholarship that is found in the volume.

It's a tough critique and I suspect it may not be well received.  It's worth reading. 

History of Reconciliation

I didn't see much notice of a recent Ontario Court of Appeal case beyond this Canadian Press story in the Globe and Mail. But what it says sounds like where this much-talked-of thing called reconciliation is going and has to go.

Whitesand FN (a litigant)

The case is called Restoule v Canada (full text of the OCA decision here). It concerns territories covered by what are known as the Huron-Robinson and Superior-Robinson Treaties of 1850.  According to the newspaper summary, the court found that the derisory $4 a head paid annually by the Crown to the First Nations involved (an amount unchanged since 1875) in no way fulfills the treaty agreement "to share the resource wealth from the territory"

"To share the resource wealth from the territory." More or less forever, First Nations elders, leaders and scholars across Canada have declared that the treaties they made with the Crown were negotiated as agreements to share the land and its wealth. More or less forever, the Crown has declared that the treaties were surrender agreements -- the land and its resources passed once and for all to the Crown. 

In the last few decades, indigenous and non-indigenous historians have been affirming and documenting in a flood of studies that the First Nations' interpretation is the accurate one. Restoule is another piece of evidence that the courts, while gamely insisting that these matters would be better solved through negotiation than litigation (fat chance!), are moving to an overwhelming and irresistable affirmation that the First Nations (and lately the historians) have been right.  As Restoule says, "an agreement to share the resource wealth from the territory."

Exactly how to share the resource wealth is not determined in Restoule, and quite likely the Supreme Court of Canada will want the opportunity to weigh in on many aspects of this case. But sharing the land, sharing the wealth is coming. First Nations are co-owners of their treaty territories, entitled to a share of the (immense, duh) wealth it generates, and entitled to use that share to support indigenous self-government within their territories.  

When that actually comes to pass, we can talk about reconciliation happening. 

Meanwhile, the almost simultaneous budget statement of the Government of Ontario proposes to commit a billion dollars to build a road that will give mining companies access to the minerals of the "Ring of Fire" region (in Treaty 9 territory north of the Restoule locations) in blithe confidence that Ontario owns everything there and can do what it wants with its resources while giving no serious attention to Treaty obligations as the courts are beginning to interpret them. On the Crown side, reconciliation remains a very long way away.  

Canadian history wars on the American radar

History News Network is an American website that daily publishes a substantial amount of original commentary by historians, as well as reprints of history-related stories from other publications. It tends a little too much to politics-over-history for my taste. Also it's very Planet America: very much an American worldview that shapes its historical coverage. Nevertheless, il a le grand mérite d'exister, as someone once said in another context.

So it is good to see Ian Rocksborough-Smith, who teaches at the University of the Fraser Valley in BC, offering Americans a news report on "Canada's own history war." It's a report on how the Canadian historical profession is grappling with truth and reconciliation questions. It focusses on the Canadian Historical Association's Canada Day declaration and the criticism promptly levelled against it. It provides copious links, and takes note of the "1619" controversy, so as to give American readers some context.

Partisans on either side of that debate may find things to quibble with in the piece.     

History of what gets attention

 "Hiding in Plain Sight" by Kathleen Mackenzie and Sean Carleton, published the other day by Active History, is more evidence that the refrain "It was never reported... It's not in the history books..."It was all covered up" has never been very accurate.  It has not been about having the evidence, but about paying attention.  

"Hiding in Plain Sight" surveys the detailed reporting on the terrible mortality of residential schools that was published in prominent newspapers and magazines... in 1907.

“Startling rate of mortality" ... "Of a total of 1,537 pupils reported from fifteen school, 7 per cent are sick or in poor health, and 24 per cent are reported dead.” ... "The remarkable mortality of the children from tuberculosis and the unsanitary condition of the schools."

What's changed is the ability and determination of Indigenous peoples across Canada to capture the conversation and make the rest of us pay attention.  And maybe the willingness to pay attention, too, a little.

Commemoration and history

The current New Yorker has an article by Sam Knight about how Britain's National Trust is beginning to deal with the fact that many of the stately homes it maintains and presents to the public were built and preserved by revenues from slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation, which they sometimes display in horrifying forms:

The fireplace holds a collection of seventeenth-century delftware, above which hangs a museum-quality Dutch painting of ornamental birds, by a court artist to William III. Facing into the room, with their backs to the wall, are two statues of kneeling Black men with rings around their necks.

 The story explores how the Trust, "known by all minority communities as a white environment that was hostile - silently hostile," is starting to deal with such situations

The Trust, arriving late to the subject, chose to adopt a sweeping approach. In a hundred-and-fifteen-page “interim report,” the charity listed houses connected to abolitionists as well as to slaveowners, along with generals, civil servants, businesspeople, politicians, and artists whose lives were in some way entwined with Britain’s four-hundred-year saga of colonial rule, which touched every continent, including Antarctica.

Also explored at length is the furious reaction to the Trust's steps by those who prefer not to have such issues aired and prefer the Trust's traditional emphasis on gardens, architecture, and furniture.  (“Beauty is always sufficient, isn’t it?” he said. “Beauty is truth, after all.”)

It's all a reminder that Canada is not the only country where historical and heritage narratives are being reconsidered, and where that whole exercise of reconsideration is being furiously attacked.  

More in another post to come.   

 

History of Allen Willie

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography's weekly online biography today offers the life of an eight year old boy, Allen Willie, who was born in 1928 on the Nautley Reserve in British Columbia and died nearby with three friends on January 1, 1937 while trying to escape from Lejac Indian Residential School and return home. 

It's not a new biography -- it was first published some years ago -- nor the only one recording the death of a residential school child -- Actually, I misinterpreted a reference, and it may be. See also on this subject, the Peter Bryce biography 

Globe&Mail on statues and reconciliation in Kingston

I recently noted here an impressive public event in Kingston, in which Charlotte Gray, Lee Maracle, and I were invited to discuss what to do about John A. and his statues, before a lively and engaged audience of some 500 at Kingston's Grand Theatre.

Turns out we got the Globe's Eric Andrew-Gee thinking about it.  (The Globe has an active paywall, but this opened for me.)  Like him, I was impressed by the range and seriousness of the City of Kingston's project to assess its statuary and its responsibilities.  The presentations Lee, Charlotte and I gave were not a one-shot thing, but part of an ongoing consultation. We all -- audience, speakers, stakeholders, city --benefited from that.

John A. Macdonald and Reconciliation

On Thursday I went to Kingston at the invitation of the Kingston Historical Society to give the Address at the annual graveside commemoration of the death of John A. Macdonald -- an event that has gone on on June 6 since 1892! I chose the topic "John A. Macdonald and Reconciliation."

It was a beautiful day. It was a moving ceremony. Thoughtful and enlightening conversations followed. The text will be published in good time by the Kingston Historical Society, of whose good works I am most appreciative. I am posting it here as well. 

Canada's first prime minister, John Alexander Macdonald of Kingston died on the 6th of June in 1891 and is buried here. Every year this gathering marks his death and commemorates his life. Today I propose that we consider as the theme for this commemoration: Reconciliation.

A graveside is a particularly appropriate place to discuss such matters. In Christian theology, Reconciliation means the end of the estrangement between God and Humanity. John A Macdonald, dead now these 128 years, would have trusted that in going to this grave he would settle his life account, make his reconciliation with his maker, and end all life's estrangements. So here, at the grave of John Macdonald, on the traditional territories of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples, let us among the living consider reconciling our own accounts, not so much with God as with each other.

For in recent years, the Reconciliation concept has moved from religion to politics. Archbishop Desmond Tutu helped inspire one of the first Truth and Reconciliation processes to help South Africa face the legacies of apartheid. Inspired by that example, Indigenous survivors of Canadian residential schools used some of their class-action settlement fund to create a Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commissioners said in their final report that the intent was to establish "a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples." I want to consider today what the life and career of John A. Macdonald can say to us about building that more nearly respectful relationship.

History of smart people doing dumb things with good intentions

The Canadian Historical Association, meeting in Saskatchewan, has voted to remove the name of John A. Macdonald from its premiere prize, the one for the year's best work in Canadian history.  In the name of the good cause of reconciliation, though removal of names and statues was not one of the long list of projects the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has put forward as useful steps toward that goal.

Naming this prize for Macdonald has always seemed a bit odd, since he was not a scholar or a historian and did not donate the prize himself.  So there may have been a more appropriate name to be found all along, and indeed the CHA will now simply call it the CHA Prize. But removing the old name punitively....  Well meant, but not wise, I'd say.

[Hat tip to Allen Levine for the link.]

Canada's History special publication on Treaties

Canada's History has announced publication of Treaties and the Treaty Relationship, a book length exploration of treaties, treaty issues, and the work of reconciliation, edited with Manitoba Treaties Commissioner Loretta Ross.

The volume, which includes essays by, among others, Karine Duhamel, William Wicken, Wabi Benais Mistatim Equay (Cynthia Bird), Guuduniia LaBoucan, and Jaime Battiste, is a resource for educators, funded by a grant from the Government of Canada, and delivered to schools and universities across Canada.  It is also available online via the link above.

Le Devoir speaks up for Hector Langevin

Today practically no one knows who Hector Langevin was, except as the namesake of an imposing stonepile called the Langevin Block in Ottawa.  So he was pretty easy to throw out of the lifeboat last week when the government of Canada wanted a symbolic sacrifice to indigenous anger on National Aboriginal Day. Somehow all the monuments to better known figures such as Macdonald and Cartier remain unchanged.

Le Devoir points out that while Langevin was a longtime member of the Canadian cabinet between 1867 and the 1890s, he had no specific responsibility for indigenous affairs for most of his career.  He was minister of Indian Affairs for about eighteen months in 1868-9, but not when major initiatives like the Indian Act were passed. The DCB biography by Andrée Desilets, which does not skimp on his other failings, covers his involvement in indigenous affairs in a single sentence, which seems about right:

In Ottawa he was also secretary of state and superintendent general of Indian affairs.

It was, in fact, the Canadian government, in the name of and with the support of the Canadian people, who developed the residential schools system, enforced the Indian Act, dispossessed the indigenous people of the prairies (and elsewhere) -- and maintained all these projects for a century or more. As a cabinet minister, Langevin had his share of collective responsibility, of course, but no more than any other from the past or today.

Le Devoir notes that anglophones have held the indigenous affairs portfolio for about 90% of the time, but so far none of them has been singled out for "l’exécution morale."

La politique fédérale de création de pensionnats autochtones a duré 113 ans. Pendant cette période, le ministère des Affaires indiennes n’a été sous la responsabilité d’un francophone que pendant 10 ans, dont 6 sous celle de Jean Chrétien. Donc, 91 % du temps, cette responsabilité a été celle de ministres anglophones. Or, aucun d’entre eux ne fait l’objet d’une compagne de dénigrement semblable à celle qui a conduit à l’exécution morale de l’avant-dernier Père de la Confédération francophone considéré comme fréquentable. Bon cent cinquantième !

If we were moving seriously towards Reconciliation and treaty implementation, maybe we could avoid these misleading acts of scapegoating. In the meantime, look for them to continue.

Update, June 29:  Allan Levine comments:

I agree wholeheartedly with Le Devoir’s position on the matter of removing Hector Langevin’s name from the building. It is yet another and blatant example of political opportunism by Justin Trudeau. Clearly anyone who is head of a cabinet knows that a cabinet minister would never have made such a decision on his own. If you’re going to condemn poor Langevin, then you have start obliterating John A. Macdonald’s name from buildings, schools, highways, etc. etc across the country. Because John A. ultimately approved the decision on creating industrial or residential schools. It would be like a century from now if the Liberal Defense minister Harjit Sajjan was held solely responsible for the current government’s foreign policy in the Middle East—as if Trudeau was an innocent spectator in drafting this policy. It’s absurd. 

Windows that open from The Story of Us

Hot Docs, a very substantial documentary film festival, is currently running in Toronto. Just to look at the program will convince, or remind, you for the ambitious, challenging, provocative, thought-provoking films being made all the time on just about every subject you can imagine.

That's my beef with The Story of Us, ultimately.  Why do television programmers accept that pretty much every mainstream CanHist program is, you know, pablum? Sure, The Story of Us has some vivid filming, some dramatic scenes, some intriguing vignettes. Having watched a few episodes -- they are all online now -- I'm not hating it. I'm just not very engaged, and I'm glad to have had no responsibility for it.

But even a disappointing program, it turns out, can stimulate discussion. Following last week's program that touched briefly on Treaty 6 and Canadian expansion on to the prairies, the CBC organized another online discussion to expand on the television program. It's actually pretty terrific. It gives us three lively, articulate indigenous panelists -- the great educator Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, western archaeologist Eldon Yellowhorn, and TRC commission director Ry Moran -- in conversation with an indigenous host, CBC broadcaster Duncan McCue.

When I was approached as they assembled the panel, I stressed that I'm not a treaty-history expert and I would not participate unless there was an indigenous majority. In fact, their choice to assemble an all-indigenous panel was brilliant. They may be talking to us, but there is a comfort level evident among the panelists that would be at least different with even one non-indigenous participant "representing" majority culture.

Listen to Eldon Yellowhorn  mentioning the history of indigenous smoking, and McCue responding: "Did they leave any advice about quitting?" Or Métis Ry Moran speaking of discovering the colonial oppression experienced by his Scots ancestors -- in Scotland. Yellowhorn even acknowledges that Canada150 is a story worth telling (something a lot of mainstream history profs seem to have trouble with!); it's just that so much else has been ignored.

And that is before they get to their vigorous, well-informed, and at times even optimistic discussion of the treaty relationship.

"This is change, actually happening right now," says Ry Moran, reflecting briefly on the shape of the panel.

Watch it. (YouTube above; Facebook link here)

Also, a couple of days ago Cassandra Szklarski wrote a widely circulated Canadian Press story quoting me among others on The Story of Us.  It's a good piece, but I'm squirming at a part where I seem to be dismissing John English and Bob Bothwell as "any old historian." It's not a misquotation, but I did mean it as a comment on the filmmakers' attitudes, and not any kind of denigration of two historians I admire and would listen to anytime  (and who are not much older than me, either!)