Role and Responsibility of Historians in Fighting Denialism

Sean Carleton

Content warning: this post contains information regarding Indian Residential Schools.

A National Residential School Crisis Line is available to provide support for former Residential School students. Emotional and crisis referral services are available by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866-925-4419.

Last week, Kimberly Murray, the Independent Special Interlocutor on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Residential Schools, released her final report in Gatineau, Quebec.

After years of research and consultation with Indigenous communities, the report, Upholding Sacred Obligations: Reparations for Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials in Canada, is now freely available to read. It contains important information regarding the truth about residential schooling as well as 42 legal, moral, and ethical obligations that governments, churches, institutions, and Canadians must meet to implement an “Indigenous-led Reparations Framework for Truth, Accountability, Justice, and Reconciliation.”

Included in the report is an emphasis on the need to confront the rise of residential school denialism, or the deliberate downplaying, distorting, and misrepresentation of residential school history to shake public confidence in truth and reconciliation and protect the status quo. In fact, there is an entire chapter (Volume 2, Chapter 15: “Fighting Denialism: Reframing Collective Memory, National History, and Commemoration”) dedicated to helping people understand the hurt and harm of residential school denialism. It also contains clear recommendations on how to fight it to support truth and reconciliation.

As part of the chapter, there is a specific focus on the work of historians, laying out our role and responsibility in fighting denialism. The section is reprinted here, with permission, for consideration and discussion.

Role and Responsibility of Historians in Fighting Denialism

The TRC was clear that, “without truth, justice, and healing, there can be no genuine reconciliation.”¹ The problem, the TRC explained, is that, “too many Canadians know little or nothing about the deep historical roots” of settler colonialism in Canada generally and genocidal policies such as the Indian Residential School System specifically.² They point out that, “this lack of historical knowledge has serious consequences…. In government circles, it makes for poor policy decisions. In the public realm, it reinforces racist attitudes and fuels civic distrust between Indigenous Peoples and non-Indigenous Canadians.”³ As a result, the TRC urged for the development of “historically literate citizens” who, through additional education about the Indian Residential School System and Indigenous-settler relations, can then use their greater historical awareness to effectively support healing, justice, and reconciliation.⁴ Indeed, as the TRC noted, “history plays an important role in reconciliation: to build for the future, Canadians must look to, and learn from the past.”⁵

One problem is that those engaging in Indian Residential School denialism understand the important role that truth-telling about the past has on social change. If establishing the truth is, as the TRC contended, the precondition for healing, justice, and reconciliation, then denialists seek to deliberately divert attention away from the truths about the horrors of Indian Residential Schools. They attack those advocating for Canadians to learn these truths and shake public confidence in the truths of Survivors. This is why denialists become obsessed with debating certain aspects about the past despite often demanding that Indigenous Peoples and Survivors “just get over it.” Since the release of the TRC’s Final Report, denialists feel that they have lost control of the narrative and, as a reactionary strategy, seek to distort, downplay, and discredit established historical truths to try and regain control. In this way, denialism can be understood as a backlash against growing historical literacy about the Indian Residential School System among the Canadian population.

To inoculate the citizenry against the spread of denialism, historians have important roles and responsibilities in facilitating further learning about the history of Indian Residential Schools and settler colonialism generally. Most obviously, historians have continued to research and publish new studies about different aspects of the Indian Residential School System and its connections to other colonial policies, including the Indian Day School System and the Sixties Scoop.⁶ New knowledge stemming from such studies further substantiates Survivors’ testimonies and deepen public understanding about the System’s many facets.⁷ Historians have also contributed to facilitating further truth-telling, including teaching new courses on the history and ongoing impacts of Indian Residential Schools; negotiating with church and State bodies to gain access to new records and documents; installing public-facing museum and art displays; completing historical and archival research for those leading search and recovery work; supporting efforts to decolonize data sovereignty and the interpretation and management of primary source records; and advocating for public commemorations related to Indian Residential Schools. In these ways and more, historians—in their different capacities—are taking up the responsibility of respecting the truths and experiences of Survivors and combining this with careful research to share new knowledge with the public in respectful, accessible, and impactful ways.

It must also be acknowledged, however, that some historians have, intentionally or not, also supported the rise of denialism. Though there is a consensus amongst historians concerning the harms of the Indian Residential School System and settler colonialism, a consensus does not mean complete unanimity.⁸ There are a handful of historians—some with no subject expertise on Indian Residential Schools—who have entered public debate to advance or support denialism. Their motivations for publishing in illegitimate sources, signing on to disingenuous public letters, and putting forward debunked argumentation that serves to downplay the harms of these institutions are unclear. Regardless, the effect is that, by engaging in denialism or associating with those scholars and outlets seeking to monetize misinformation about the past and trade in anti-Indigenous racism, these historians lend their legitimacy to denialism and contribute to the muddying of public knowledge about Indian Residential Schools. This directly undermines healing, justice, and reconciliation.

Over time, as more people learn how to identify and confront Indian Residential School denialism—as part of the work to become historically literate citizens—denialism will become untenable within the historical profession. In the meantime, historians committed to truth and evidence-based argumentation must continue to challenge the denialism amongst their ranks and work to help Canadians understand Survivor truths and the complex history of the Indian Residential School System as well as its ongoing legacy.

Dealing with denialists must not be the sole purview of historians; in helping to create “historically literate citizens,” they can make an important contribution to putting truth before reconciliation.

Sean Carleton is a settler historian and an Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba.

1. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), 12. ↩︎
2. TRC, A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools, ed. and abridged (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016), 144. ↩︎
3. TRC, Knock on the Door, 144. ↩︎
4. TRC, Honouring the Truth, 251. ↩︎
5. TRC, Knock on the Door, 144. ↩︎
6. See, for example, Jackson Pind, “Indian Day Schools in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg Territory, 1899–1978” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2021); Allyson Stevenson, Intimate Integration: The Sixties Scoop and the Colonization of Indigenous Kinship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). ↩︎
7. See, for example, Crystal Gail Fraser, “T’aih k’ìighe’ tth’aih zhit dìidìch’ùh (By Strength, We Are Still Here): Indigenous Northerners Confronting Hierarchies of Power at Day and Residential Schools in Nanhkak Thak (the Inuvik Region, Northwest Territories), 1959–1982” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2019); Jane Griffith, Words Have A Past: The English Language: Colonialism, and the Newspapers of Indian Boarding Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019); Alexandra Giancarlo, “Indigenous Student Labour and Settler Colonialism at Brandon Residential School,” Canadian Geographer 64, no. 3 (Fall 2020): 461–74; Natalie Cross and Thomas Peace, ‘“My Own Old
   English Friends’: Networking Anglican Settler Colonialism at the Shingwauk Home, Huron College, and Western University,” Historical Studies in Education 33, no.1 (Spring 2021): 22–49; Sean Carleton, Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022); Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Nii Ndahlohke: Boys’ and Girls’ Work at Mount Elgin Industrial School, 1890–1915 (Altona, MB: Friesen Press, 2022). ↩︎
8. See the “Media Coverage/Reactions to the Canadian Historical Association’s Canada Day Statement Recognizing the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Canada,” compiled by Canadian Historical Association President Steven High, Canadian Historical Association, September 17, 2021, https://cha-shc.ca/media-coverage-reaction-to-the-canadian-historical-associations-canada-day-statement-recognizing-the-genocide-of-indigenous-peoples-in-canada/. ↩︎