Residential school denialism among right-wing politicians is disinformation meant to sow public doubt, fuel anti-Indigenous racism
‘The Indian residential school system was nothing more than institutionalized pedophilia' BC Supreme Court justice says – Event at Stó:lō Nation this Thursday to address growing problem of Indian Residential School denialism
Maggie Smith lived in the tiny and remote community of Port Douglas at the north end of Harrison Lake in the 1960s.
She and her siblings spoke the Halq’emeylem language of the First Peoples living in this area “since time immemorial,” as is often described by Indigenous leaders – certainly for many thousands of years, according to scientists.
Maggie was five years old in 1968 when she was taken away.
She doesn’t remember how or exactly when, but she and her siblings, just as approximately 2,000 other Indigenous children in British Columbia, were taken to the St. Mary’s Indian Residential School in Mission.
“I don’t know how I got there,” Smith said. “I just remember being there.”
Born in 1963, Maggie was at St. Mary’s from 1968 to 1971, a time that had a lifelong impact on her.
“They made us go to church and do confessions. I don’t remember my language at all. We weren’t allowed to speak our language.”
She recalls violence in classrooms over minor transgressions such as spelling words wrong. But the hardest part for her was being away from her family.
“It was hard to understand why we needed to be taken away. You are there and you are lonely because your family is far away.”
Chilliwack politicians & denialism
When Chilliwack’s newest school planning was underway, a committee to name the school suggested one favoured by several local First Nations leaders to reflect the true history of the area where the school is located on the Vedder River.
Stitó:s Lá:lém Totí:lt was the name of the K-8 school adopted, but it was one that former Chilliwack school board member Darrell Furgason along with now-MLA Heather Maahs and Barry Neufeld hated. Incidentally, all three of them were called out by the Anti-Hate Network during the last municipal election.
“It is a very difficult collection of words,” Furgason said in the April 28, 2020, virtual meeting. “I think this name … is exclusive and we need it to be inclusive.”
Trustee Jared Mumford pointed out that it took his young son about five minutes to learn the pronunciation. It’s not difficult. Pre-school children can do it.
Here is how to pronounce the simple six-syllable school’s name:
When someone introduces a topic by saying “I’m not racist but,” usually what they are about to say is racist.
“Here’s what I want to make this clear,” Furgason said, “in discussing anything on this board it doesn’t mean one is a racist or a bigot, or anti-First Nations people.”
Then he strongly disagreed that giving a school a name supported by the committee tasked with coming up with a name – one approved by First Nations leaders – was a time to demonstrate reconciliation.
Maahs and Neufeld agreed with him 100 per cent.
The conversation at this school board meeting is an example of the dangerous and racist residential school denialism, a disease infecting many on the far right who refuse to accept reality by actively distorting or dismissing the truth.
Residential school denialism is a conscious effort to deny, minimize, downplay, or distort the facts, experiences, or impacts of the Indian Residential School system in Canada,
Maahs’ friend in the BC Conservative Party (before she was kicked out) Dallas Brodie is the most recent and egregious example of denialism. Maahs and Brodie also showed their support for Donald Trump and the MAGA movement when they were among five far-right MLAs who voted against a motion to call on MLAs to condemn U.S. President Donad Trump’s tariff threats.
After hundreds of unmarked graves of children were found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School using ground-penetrating radar, confirming oral histories of First Nations people, shock and self-reflection hit both the Indigenous community and others with empathy and understanding about history.
Not for Brodie or other denialists.
"The number of confirmed child burials at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site is zero. Zero. No one should be afraid of the truth. Not lawyers, their governing bodies or anyone else."
Chilliwack-Cultus Lake MLA and BC Conservative House Leader A’aliya Warbus, daughter of former judge and lieutenant governor Steven Point, was rightly unimpressed. (She did, however, join a party full of denialists so she shouldn’t have been surprised.)
"Questioning the narratives of people who lived and survived these atrocities is nothing but harmful and taking us backward in reconciliation,” Warbus said.
The Union of BC Indian Chiefs called Brodie’s words “racist residential school denialism,” and demanded an apology that they never got.
To illustrate how ignorant and out of touch with reality the denialism is from people like Furgason and Maahs and Brodie, BC Conservative Party leader John Rustad – a man as right wing as they come – booted Brodie out of the party for mocking and belittling survivors.
The First Nations Leadership Council then responded to what they called a rise of residential school denialism that same month, ”particularly the egregious misuse of public office by elected officials using their platforms to sow public doubt and promote misinformation and anti-Indigenous racism.”
The FNLC called for the government of Canada create laws to protect against residential school denialism as was been done with Bill C-19, which criminalized Holocaust denialism.
Back to Furgason and Stitó:s
“If you feel like reconciliation means that you have to do all these things to demonstrate that hundreds of years ago – and that was the argument before – ‘these people have for hundreds of years gone to residential schools,’ That’s not a reason to name a school,” Furgason countered. “That’s a political point at an attempt to show reconciliation in this simple little way.”
Furgason, Maahs, Neufeld, Brodie, and other far right politicians in British Columbia not only downplay the genocidal reality of residential schools, Furgason believes the universe is 6,000 years old, ignoring the reality that First Nations people have lived in what we call North America for more than 12,000 years. (And that we know the universe is more than 13 billion years old.)
But worse than his nonsensical beliefs based on literal interpretations of old testament passages is his wilfully ignorant language, that “these people” went to school “for hundreds of years” and it was “hundreds of years ago.”
“That’s not a reason to name a school,” Furgason said.
The first residential school in B.C. was St. Mary’s in Mission in 1867. It was also the final school to close in B.C. in 1984. The last federally funded residential school to close in Canada was Kivalliq Hall in Rankin Inlet in 1997, 28 years ago. This was not hundreds of years ago.
'Institutionalized pedophilia'
In 1995, BC Supreme Court Justice Douglas Hogarth sentenced Henry Plint to 11 years in prison for abusing 16 young boys at the Alberni Indian Residential School.
Justice Hogarth stated that Plint was a “sexual terrorist” and that the people running residential schools condoned the institutional sexual abuse of children.
Willy Blackwater was raped by Plint, who was a dorm supervisor, in the residential school once a month for three years. When he finally got the nerve to tell someone higher up in the school what Plint was doing, “he gave me a severe strapping and called me a dirty, lying Indian.”
What’s clear from the stories told by a fraction of people who were abused in schools – because most people don’t report abuse or are ignored – is that residential schools were “factories for child abuse,” according to Hogarth.
“As far as the victims were concerned, the Indian residential school system was nothing more than institutionalized pedophilia. . . . Generations of children were wrenched from their families and were brought up to be ashamed to be Indians.”
Why did they do this?
After her time in the residential school, Maggie's father who was an alcoholic, died when she was just 10. She then lived with her mother in Chilliwack where she endured all-too-common racism towards Indigenous people.
What saved her was, somewhat ironically, her Christian faith. She started to go to church as a teenager and it stuck.
“Having faith helped me to overcome my past,” she said. “I think I needed that in my life.”
And while she did not suffer some of the more serious abuse many residential school survivors report, she knows some of her siblings suffered greatly. But no one much likes to talk about it.
“I don’t know what they went through.”
One younger sister is still dealing with her trauma. Her brother Lloyd lives in Pemberton but he doesn’t like coming off the reserve.
So much was taken away from her and all of Canada’s Indigenous people through the residential school system, but Maggie wants to claw some of it back. Through counselling she has overcome the fear imbued in her at St. Mary’s, and one day she is thinking of learning her traditional language.
“It took me a long time to overcome those fears. I had to find myself after being in a residential school. You don’t know which way to turn. You don’t know who you are. You have to find yourself and see who you are.
“I am now seeing myself as a person, not as that little girl who was living in fear.”
With faith and forgiveness she has overcome sexual abuse and cultural destruction, both are what she will need moving forward.
Everyone welcome
The Stó:lō Research Resource Management Centre is hosting an event as part of their Cultural Experiene Series on Thursday, Sept. 18, 2025 at the Coqualeetza site at 7201 Vedder Rd., building 10, from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.
“Discussing Residential Schools: Local Perspetives,” will include a presentation by Nicola Campbell and Carrielynn Victor about their upcoming children's book.
There will also be a presentation of the Declaration Rejecting Indian Residential School Denialism recently drafted by the BC Lead Communities Technical Working Group followed by a panel discussion on residential schools linked to the work of local investigation team members, including elder/survivor Clarence Pennier, archeologist Dave Schaepe, Amber Kostuchenko, Kristina Celli, and Keith Carlson.
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Paul J. Henderson
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