After an NDP MP who wants to criminalize “residential school denialism” alleged the book “Grave Error” was an “incitement of hate” concerning residential schools, co-author Tom Flanagan has challenged the MP to a debate on the book’s merits.
NDP MP Leah Gazan, the author of the residential school denialism bill, made the accusation while speaking to reporters during a press conference on Thursday alongside the government’s special interlocutor on residential schools, Kimberly Murray, and former residential school students.
Murray released her final report Tuesday, which recommended much of what Gazan’s Bill C-413 proposes to enact into law, including the criminalization of anyone who questions the residential school system narrative.
When asked what sorts of things would be criminalized by the bill, Gazan mentioned Tom Flanagan by name and referenced “his book” Grave Error: How the Media Misled US (And the Truth About Residential Schools).
“(Bill C-413) is about the willful condoning of Indigenous hate by condoning, downplaying, denying or justifying what happened in the residential school. It’s not about people talking around the kitchen table,” Gazan said. “But I would point to you folks like Tom Flanagan, who are doing willful mass promotion and disinformation of facts around well-documented historical facts in his book, as examples of that mass dissemination of hate.”
In an interview with True North, Flanagan, a former political science professor and member of the Indian Residential School Research Group, responded to the allegations and challenged Gazan to debate him on the book’s specific findings.
“People who want to outlaw speech generally don’t feel confident in their arguments and know that they would have trouble refuting what others have said,” he said.
He said it’s impossible to respond to such general accusations of “disinformation” and “spreading hate” when not a single claim made by the book’s 18 authors has been identified as sources of the supposed “disinformation.” He noted that the book’s 18 authors, who range from professors of various disciplines to lawyers and journalists, are “used to dealing with facts” and that the book is “heavily footnoted” with over 800 sources listed.
“So let her point out where she thinks we’ve misinterpreted or overlooked a source,” he said. “You can’t have any kind of rational argument until you get down to specifics.”
He said the book has been criticized in very general terms by people such as Gazan or Indigenous activists but has largely been ignored rather than scrutinized by academic critics.
Flanagan is open to “any form” of debate, whether it’s live over Zoom or a public written exchange between Flanagan or the book’s other authors and Gazan, as long as both sides can present arguments and allow the other side a chance to respond. He says the audience can decide which arguments are most persuasive.
While speaking to reporters at the conference, Gazan said the presence of burial sites near residential schools was enough evidence to prove the school’s administrators were killing students.
“The historical record is clear,” Gazan said. “The purpose of residential schools was to kill the Indian in the child. No school should have grave sites around it. I don’t know any public schools across the country that have grave sites around it.”
Flanagan said the comparison was an “apples to pineapples” comparison.
“In most cases, students came from far away. There were enormous health problems in the late 19th and early 20th century; students died from illnesses. We know that in some cases, it wasn’t possible to send the body back for burial in the home reserve,” he said.
He said that many, not all, of the schools, were established next to church cemeteries, and some of the students’ burials would have been interned in those parish grave sites. He said there were often practical reasons, such as the inability to travel to the student’s remote reserve, especially in the winter.
Flanagan said Murray’s report and Gazan’s comments imply the schools were execution sites with cemeteries present for convenience. Instead, he argued the sites were “accommodations to the conditions of the age.” One former residential school student during the conference claimed, however, that the reason many of the kids died from disease was because of a lack of access to medical care.
Gazan also said she “couldn’t think of anything more violent” than denying the claims of genocide from the stories of residential school students who she dubbed “living historical records.” Flanagan dismissed the statement, saying the conflation of words and actions was a “classic” manoeuver from left-wingers to outlaw speech with which they disagree.