Exposing Residential School Denialism’s Transnational Network

By Sean Carleton, Alan Lester, Adele Perry, and Omeasoo Wahpasiw

Residential school denialism is on the rise in Canada and meaningful reconciliation is at risk.¹ After the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report in 2015, and especially since the Tk’emlúps te Secwe?pemc Nation’s 2021 announcement about the location of potential unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School and the confirmation of additional deaths at other schools across the country, many priests, pundits, and politicians across the country have engaged in what is known as residential school denialism.²

Denialists do not usually deny the residential school system’s existence, or even that it did damage. Rather, like in other cases of denialism, they employ a discourse that twists, distorts, and misrepresents basic facts about residential schooling to shake public confidence in truth and reconciliation efforts, defend guilty and culpable parties, and protect Canada’s colonial status quo.

Denialism spikes at predictable times, such as the anniversary of the Kamloops announcement (May 27) and Orange Shirt Day (marked in Canada on September 30 as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation). Indeed, in the period leading up to and just following September 30, 2024, there were a number of concerning incidents of denialism – from the usual far-right publications promoting the “positives” of the genocidal IRS system to the spreading of conspiracy theories and disinformation by politicians and social influencers.³

In response, a number of Indigenous writers have pointed out the harms that denialism causes and stressed the need for settler Canadians to confront this dangerous phenomenon if Canada is serious about its commitment to truth and reconciliation.⁴

What is getting less attention, however, is residential school denialism’s global spread. Residential school denialism may have its origins in Canada, but it is increasingly circulating and being used around the world as part of a wider matrix of imperial apologetics – a transnational network of discourse that aims to defend the legacy of the British Empire in the metropole and former colonies.⁵

Circuits of Empire

To better understand denialism’s transnational nature, it is important first to contextualize this phenomenon as a continuation of the imperial project itself. As historians have demonstrated in recent decades, raw resources during the age of empire were often extracted from colonies and shipped back to the metropole to be manufactured, consumed, and sold on the global market through transimpeiral networks for profit. This multidirectional circuit of draining wealth from the colonies and consolidating imperial power – often legitimized discursively by insisting on the benevolent and even humanitarian intentions of empire – was a cornerstone of European empires.⁶ Today, the old circuits of empire are being repurposed in bitterly contested culture wars. Imperial apologists are drawing on denialism created in former colonies to redeem the empire, protect its spoils, and weaponize imperial heritage as a political tool today.⁷

In this context, residential school denialism in Canada has become a common feature of the surge in imperial apologetics across the former British Empire.

The Truth About Empire

Exposing residential school denialism’s transnational network is one contribution of a chapter we (Carleton, Perry, Wahpasiw) have written about the manipulation of Canadian and Indigenous histories by imperial apologists for the new collection, The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of the British Empire, which is edited by our fellow co-author (Lester).⁸ The book brings together the expertise of historians from different parts of the former empire to confront the tactics of denial and disavowal used by apologists generally and, as an example, specifically Nigel Bigger’s best-selling book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning.⁹

As Lester explains in The Truth About Empire’s introduction, “the culture war is about politics rather than historical understanding.”¹⁰ Moreover, he explains, “For its most avid participants, interpretations of the past are simply a weapon to be wielded in a struggle between progressive and reactionary philosophies and instincts.”¹¹ In gathering subject experts “intent on telling the truth based on the evidence we have analyzed and debated over many years,” The Truth About Empire marshals a defence not of the imperial past but the expertise of imperial historians.¹²

Yet, the power of the collection, at least in our eyes, is that we do not simply assert our expertise as the truth because we say so. Instead, we do the work of historians. We reveal how Biggar’s argumentation (like imperial apologetics generally) is flawed by triangulating and interpreting facts about the colonial past in rigorous ways to guide public understanding. We base our analyses on careful examinations of records generated at the time and preserved in oral history, written records kept in archives, and published accounts that draw out nuance, complexity, and historical understanding. This may be less appealing to a popular audience than the easy comforts offered by right-wing pseudo-historians profiting from publishing books and articles that soothe the conflicted consciences of readers during a period of imperial reckoning, but it is important to stick up for the truth about empire nonetheless.

Residential School Denialism’s Transnational Network

Biggar’s recent writings are also a good example of how apologists use residential school denialism specifically as part of their efforts to justify British imperialism on the whole. As Lester has made clear, cherry-picking, or selectively using evidence to misrepresent the complex truth, is a key tactic of apologists, and it is easy to see how writers like Biggar cherry-pick the history and historiography of residential schooling for the purposes of justification.¹³

In Colonialism, Biggar misrepresents Canadian and Indigenous scholarship to recast the process of settler colonialism in the northern part of North America as beneficent. Drawing on dubious and often discredited sources – such as the work of right-wing strategist Thomas Flanagan and the pseudo-history journal The Dorchester Review – Biggar makes a number of problematic arguments, from painting Métis resistance leader Louis Riel as recognizing a logical rationale for colonization to discounting and discrediting Indigenous experience and epistemologies and defending residential schools as being essentially “humanitarian” institutions.¹⁴ Moreover, Biggar selectively engages with Canada’s colonial history, leaving out important aspects that do not fit his narrative. The long history of the Hudson’s Bay Company, for instance, receives no mention in Colonialism.

Concerning residential schooling specifically, Biggar draws on right-wing sources to discredit the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report, which demonstrated the system was genocidal, and cherry-picks from one book, J.R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision, to stress the so-called “positive” aspects of the system. Overwhelmingly, Canadian historians will, of course, see through such flimsy argumentation for what it is: disingenuous source engagement obviously meant to justify what scholars agree – despite a handful of detractors – was a genocidal school system.¹⁵ Even Miller’s work, which denies the genocidal intent of the system and stresses certain positive aspects, acknowledges the residential school system’s overall destructive consequences for Indigenous Peoples. Quite simply, Shingwauk’s Vision does not support Biggar’s assertion that residential schools were “humanitarian” institutions. The issue is that Biggar’s audience are not likely to pick up on the misrepresentation of the history and historiography in Canada, and his ideas are spreading as legitimate knowledge rather than a repackaging of dubious and discredited denialism that must be refuted.

Biggar has doubled down on denialism in even more recent writing.¹⁶ Worse, he has moved from a simple misrepresentation of scholarly work to an open embrace of far-right, conspiratorial publications on residential schooling.

This summer, Biggar weighed into the discourse on empire again and invoked the positives of residential schooling in Canada as the crescendo of his argument. For his evidence, he references the book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). Biggar does not inform his readers that, in Canada, Grave Error has been discredited by experts as right-wing propaganda.¹⁷ Among many falsehoods, the book promotes the debunked “mass grave hoax” conspiracy theory.¹⁸ Grave Error is not a peer-reviewed book; the majority of authors are not scholars; there are no residential school historians; and there is not a single Indigenous author included. Nevertheless, Biggar draws on the book’s clumsy argumentation to cast doubt on deaths in residential schools and thereby minimize their hurt and harm. Specifically, he employs a discursive sleight of hand used in the book: insisting that not one “murdered” child has been proven, strategically changing the narrative/moving the goalposts to deliberate killings and murder rather than the overwhelmingly documented neglect, abuse, disease and death in the institutions established by the TRC.¹⁹

Self-published works such as Grave Error find an audience all too willing to consume denialism as legitimate – and comforting – discourse. But as Biggar’s use of the book demonstrates, the spread of misinformation and disinformation about residential schooling is no longer a provincial, local matter; it is a global problem.

Truth Before Reconciliation

But the problem is bigger than Biggar, of course. His work is but one example of the dangers of residential school denialism’s transnational spread. Culture warriors looking for new ways of defending the British Empire are eagerly consuming and promoting residential school denialism created in Canada and using it to stress the empire’s beneficent and humanitarian nature to resist an imperial reckoning and rebuff calls for reparations and reconciliation.²⁰

In short, denialism is no longer restricted to Canada. It is increasingly circulating as part of a transnational network and being used globally to shape international opinion in concerning ways.

Fighting to put truth before reconciliation, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada stressed, is thus no longer a domestic issue but rather an international one as well.

This means that new transnational tools and strategies – as the recent report by Kimberly Murray, the Special Interlocutor on Unmarked Graves and Missing Children Associated with Residential Schools – will be needed to combat the rise of residential school denialism.²¹ Indeed, Murray makes clear that governments, churches, institutions, and Canadians have legal, moral, and ethical obligations to implement an Indigenous-led Reparations Framework for Truth, Accountability, Justice, and Reconciliation.

We must have truth – both at home and abroad – before reconciliation.

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1. See Niigaan Sinclair and Sean Carleton, “Residential School Denialism is on the Rise,” The Tyee, June 20, 2023, https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2023/06/20/Residential-School-Denialism-On-Rise/; Brett Forester, “Residential School Deniers, White Supremacists Biggest Barrier to Reconciliation says Murray Sinclair,” APTN, January 12, 2021, https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/residential-school-deniers-white-supremacists-biggest-barrier-to-reconciliation-says-murray-sinclair/. ↩︎
2. Daniel Heath Justice and Sean Carleton, “Truth Before Reconciliation: 8 Ways to Identify and Confront Residential School Denialism,” The Conversation, August 5, 2021, https://theconversation.com/truth-before-reconciliation-8-ways-to-identify-and-confront-residential-school-denialism-164692; Ashley Joannou, “At Least 55 Children Died or Disappeared at Residential School Near Williams Lake, B.C.: Report,” Global News, October 12, 2024, https://globalnews.ca/news/10809465/williams-lake-residential-school-remains/; Brett Forester, “Coroner’s Probe Finds 220 Additional Deaths at Ontario Residential Schools,” December 2, 2024, https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/coroner-ontario-residential-schools-investigation-1.7396884. ↩︎
3. See, for example, Charyl Chan, “BC Election: Conservative Candidate Under Fire Again, This Time Over Residential Schools,” Vancouver Sun, October 11, 2024, https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/bc-election-conservative-candidate-under-fire-again-this-time-over-residential-schools. ↩︎
4. Tanya Talaga, “Canada Must Stand Against Residential School Denialism,” Globe and Mail, October 10, 2024, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-must-stand-against-residential-school-denialism/; Drew Hayden Taylor, “Residential-school Denialists Are Adding Insult to Injury,” TVO Today, October 9, 2024, https://www.tvo.org/article/opinion-residential-school-denialists-are-adding-insult-to-injury. ↩︎
5. Sathnam Sanghera, “Imperial Nostalgia Has Become So Extreme,” The Guardian, June 8, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/jun/08/imperial-nostalgia-has-become-so-extreme-sathnam-sanghera-on-the-conflict-surrounding-colonial-history. ↩︎
6. See Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “The Drain of Wealth: Colonialism Before the First World War,” Monthly Review, February 21, 2021, https://monthlyreview.org/2021/02/01/the-drain-of-wealth/; Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal 54, no. 1 (Autumn 2002): 24–48. ↩︎
7. Charlotte Lydia Riely, “Battleground in the Culture Wars,” New Lines Magazine, July 5, 2024, https://newlinesmag.com/essays/britains-imperial-past-has-become-a-battleground-in-the-culture-wars/. ↩︎
8. Alan Lester, ed. The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism (Hurst, 2024). ↩︎
9. Nigel Bigger, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (William Collins, 2023). ↩︎
10. Lester, The Truth About Empire, 11. ↩︎
11. Lester, The Truth About Empire, 11. ↩︎
12. Lester, The Truth About Empire, 15. ↩︎
13. Alan Lester, “The British Empire in the Culture War: Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 51, no. 4 (2024): 763–795. ↩︎
14. Adele Perry, Sean Carleton, Omeasoo Wahpasiw, “The Misuse of Indigenous and Canadian History in Colonialism,” in The Truth About Empire, 73–92. ↩︎
15. See J.R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press, 1996). On the matter of genocide see, for example, Andrew Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (University of Manitoba Press, 2015); Sean Carleton and Andrew Woolford, “Ignore Debaters and Denialists, Canada’s Treatment of Indigenous Peoples Fits the Definition of Genocide,” The Conversation, October 25, 2021, https://theconversation.com/ignore-debaters-and-denialists-canadas-treatment-of-indigenous-peoples-fits-the-definition-of-genocide-170242. ↩︎
16. Nigel Biggar, “History Lessened: Who Gets to Decide How We See the Past?” The Spectator, June 12, 2024: https://nigelbiggar.uk/2024/06/13/history-lessened-who-gets-to-decide-how-we-see-the-past/. ↩︎
17. Richard Butler, “This is a Worrying Book,” The British Columbia Review, July 2, 2024, https://thebcreview.ca/2024/07/02/2216-butler-champion-flanagan/. ↩︎
18. Sean Carleton and Reid Gerbrandt, “We Fact-checked Residential School Denialists and Debunked Their “Mass Grave Hoax” Theory,” The Conversation, October 17, 2023, https://theconversation.com/we-fact-checked-residential-school-denialists-and-debunked-their-mass-grave-hoax-theory-213435. ↩︎
19. C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, eds., Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) (Truth North and Dorchester Books, 2023), 10. For more on this kind of rhetorical strategy, see Alan Lester, “The Right Wing Culture War and the Refusal to Listen,” November 19, 2024, https://alanlester.co.uk/blog/the-right-wing-culture-war-and-the-refusal-to-listen/. ↩︎
20. See, for example, “‘Astonishing Bit of Fake News’ Exposed in Canada,” Sky News Australia, February 1, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egbXE18omy0; Matt Walsh, “The Newest and Most Shameless Hoax to Demonize Christians,” August 21, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ5qHwxDM50. ↩︎
21. Kimberly Murray, Upholding Sacred Obligations: Reparations for Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children and Unmarked Burials in Canada, 2024, https://osi-bis.ca/osi-resources/reports/. ↩︎

Sean Carleton is a settler historian and Associate Professor in the Departments of History and Indigenous Studies at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia.

Alan Lester (FRHistS) is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex and Adjunct Professor of History at La Trobe University. His books include Colonialism and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire and Deny and Disavow: Distancing the Imperial Past in the Culture Wars.

Adele Perry is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Manitoba, where she is also director of the Centre for Human Rights Research. She is committed to creating and disseminating critical histories of empire in the lands she was raised and lives as a settler.

Omeasoo Wahpasiw is a néhiyaw iskwew living in Anishinaabe territory. She co-wrote the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nation’s Women’s Commission submission to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and 2SLGBTQQIA+ People and is cross-appointed with Carleton University School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies and the Department of History.