In this episode, Dr. Brenda Whitteson joins me to talk about her experience being fired from Mount Royal University for challenging the government's policy on Indigenous issues. We discuss the lack of academic freedom in Canadian universities, and why we need to have more academic discussion on issues such as the unmarked graves, the ground penetrating radar discovery, and Indigenous genocide.
00:05:28.160So my parents-in-law, who went to residential school for eight years, and my wife, who was in Old Sun residential school for 10 years,
00:05:36.620they went to the Apology by the Anglican Church.
00:05:40.860And in the middle of the week-long session out at Menaki Lodge, which is about 100 kilometers east of Winnipeg here,
00:05:49.100they phoned and said we had to come and pick them up because the emotions were so high they couldn't even get a reasonable discussion.
00:05:57.200So on the way back to Winnipeg, I asked my parents-in-law, well, what did you learn in residential school that turns out to be something positive?
00:06:06.700And my mother-in-law, without skipping a beat, said, I'm talking to you, aren't I?
00:06:10.780Meaning that they learned how to speak English.
00:06:12.820And if the Aboriginals didn't learn how to speak English, they couldn't talk to each other across the country.
00:06:17.340They need to have a common language in order to speak, and she recognized that.
00:09:26.780I've read discussions between officials at the time, school officials and government officials.
00:09:31.520And they said, well, what can we do about it?
00:09:34.040It wasn't as if they didn't think, no, there was a problem, but they actually concluded that they would have to close down the schools if they insisted on a clean bill of health for every child.
00:09:45.480The fact was that the children, particularly the Plains Indian peoples, were very unhealthy at the time.
00:10:41.860So I think we always have to factor that in when we're considering these issues, Corey.
00:10:48.080Yeah, and, you know, again, I like, as I kind of said before the show started, going out myself and looking at things.
00:10:55.180And when I used to work in the eastern United States, for example, in a lot of rural areas, I've always liked cemeteries, actually.
00:11:00.020I just find them peaceful spots to wander and look around.
00:11:02.460But something striking when you go into those family plots and areas and you look between 1919, 1920, and you'll see whole families that were wiped out.
00:12:03.720The other thing that's really interesting about the deaths from tuberculosis at residential schools is that, yes, for a time in those early years, they were very bad.
00:12:17.080And probably residential school death rate was similar to what was going on at the reserve.
00:12:22.140But over time, the federal government and the churches did work very hard at residential schools to bring those numbers down.
00:12:30.180So in the 1930s and 40s, for instance, the death rate at residential schools then compared relatively favorably to normal schools or mainstream schools, while the death rate on reserves continued to be very high.
00:12:48.160And it's a shame that death rates were so high in reserves.
00:12:56.300And the idea that residential schools were killing the children, no, diseases were killing the children.
00:13:04.040And those were the normal diseases of the day.
00:13:06.400Maybe I could jump in and say something.
00:13:09.260I had tuberculosis meningitis and I was in what was called a preventorium to prevent other people from getting it when I was a kid from 1946 to 1948.
00:13:54.660Yeah, we can't measure against that lens at all.
00:13:57.800I mean, it wasn't relatively long ago that polio was wiping out children as well.
00:14:02.600And again, it wasn't exclusive to residential schools.
00:14:04.760So, you know, speaking with Professor Whittowson, I mean, we're getting a lot of revisionist history going on, which is a dangerous, dangerous trend going.
00:14:14.180And when we're quelling any discussion to it, I mean, our defenders against this should be in the halls of academia.
00:14:19.900And we're seeing that that's not working right now.
00:14:24.600The only people we tend to see speaking out.
00:14:27.240We know that there's others who are silently thinking it but not saying it tend to be retired professors or unfortunately, in your case, a fired one.
00:14:34.880Yes, well, we need to restore our universities to their academic character.
00:14:40.420And this is a big battle that's got to be fought.
00:14:43.340But the most prominent organization in Canada that is doing that, I should mention, is the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, www.safs.ca.
00:14:55.620And the president, Mark Mercer, and the board, I'm a board member of that organization.
00:15:00.200And we are working tirelessly to write to university presidents, to hold events, to discuss these issues.
00:15:07.060So what is needed now is organization, organization of academics at the local university level, at the national level, through the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship, and then internationally.
00:15:20.500There's many good organizations, such as the Free Speech Union, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, and the National Association of Scholars.
00:15:30.380So this is really a work in progress, but many academics are opposed to what is happening.
00:15:38.940It's just that it's very difficult because if you act as an individual, you will have all sorts of policies directed against you.
00:15:48.400And the important ones are harassment policies, human rights policies, and code of conduct policies.
00:15:54.740What's happening is if you ask questions, which a member who identifies as being part of an oppressed group does not like, they will charge you with harassment, and you'll have to go through an investigation on that basis.
00:16:09.680And that's what happened to me, is that I had to go through many investigations.
00:16:16.000All I was doing initially was asking questions, and then when people tried to get me fired, I tried to defend myself from getting fired.
00:16:23.500And basically, I was told that I could not defend myself because I was sort of in opposition to members of groups that the university wanted to protect.
00:16:33.980So this is a major, major problem in universities, not just in Canada, throughout the Western world.
00:16:41.180And academics, if you're listening to this, we need to organize and we need to fight back against these constraints on academic freedom and open inquiry in universities.
00:16:54.980And, you know, Jordan Peterson was mentioned earlier, again, whether people like or don't like.
00:16:58.900I mean, the way he was attacked for breaking from the orthodoxy.
00:17:03.660Or God Saw It is another gentleman who has written extensively on what's happening in there and covering it.
00:17:09.220And we really should be all very, very concerned with that trend.
00:17:13.200Another thing, I mean, not to sound callous, but, you know, in speaking with Rod and that is a lot of the people who experienced the residential schools and had positive experiences are getting older.
00:17:25.940And we need to document those experiences from that point of view as well.
00:17:30.320And as you said, if people don't even want to talk about it anymore, we're going to they're getting shouted down.
00:17:35.200We're going to lose the ability to document their experiences at these facilities, you know, while we can.
00:17:43.100And there's a lot of positive things that people have said about residential schools, those people that have actually worked in residential schools like I have.
00:17:52.160But nobody wants to hear their message and they're not being phoned up and asked to do presentations at churches or or at at community clubs or whatever to get the other side of the message out and to have a debate going in on on this issue.
00:18:11.080In the same sort of way that that Francis is admitting that universities, you can't get a debate going in terms of the way people are being treated because of their ideological position or what they think are facts in a situation in comparison to what other people think are facts in those situations.
00:18:30.680And we need to have more of a discussion about these sorts of things.
00:18:34.000We simply can't listen to people say what they think went on and and any contrary evidence can't be can't be brought forward.
00:18:44.080Well, that's an anecdotal evidence in oral histories.
00:18:47.200I mean, they're difficult at the best of times.
00:18:49.700But I mean, the best you can hope to get out of those then is to get as many people offering input from their experiences as possible, because we certainly accept at face value a lot of the anecdotes from some people saying that there were
00:19:01.300what babies hung up in basements and some some pretty absurd accusations that they get taken as fact.
00:19:08.060And then when somebody says, Well, hey, you know, I didn't think it was all that bad there, they get shouted down, right?
00:19:53.400And I'll go back to Ms. Whittowson with, you know, we want to find the truth.
00:19:57.320I mean, if indeed there were 215 murdered, buried children in Kamloops, and we just got a recent report that Jaime sent me from another individual that shows records that it's very likely there's a whole lot of septic tiles and things that were buried in that area where they found their anomalies.
00:20:15.120There's a very high chance there's not any bodies down there.
00:20:18.380Shouldn't we, though, be digging these holes as soon as possible?
00:20:21.060Well, because if these crimes happened, the perpetrators might still be alive and we want to get them.
00:20:53.100It's just that memory, especially after many, many years, becomes, you know, clouded.
00:20:59.840And as well, you can implant memories in people.
00:21:03.480So what has to happen is, first of all, there's a report that was done by the ground penetrating radar specialist, Sarah Beaulieu, and that report has been kept secret by the band.
00:21:17.140There's really no other things that have to happen at this initial stage, but that report has to be released so it can be viewed by outside experts.
00:21:26.140Then there was an RCMP investigation that was initially started and Marie Sinclair became involved in cautioning Sarah Beaulieu on, you know, to get a lawyer and to be concerned about answering questions in the RCMP.
00:21:42.500I don't know where that's at, I don't know where that's at, but that should be reopened.
00:21:49.760That's the only way you are going to be able to determine whether there are remains there.
00:21:55.580And that should have been done a year ago.
00:21:57.500And we're, for some reason, we cannot seem to get that going.
00:22:02.120And it really is, I don't understand why, if you think that there are 215 murdered children in an apple orchard, why the RCMP isn't starting this process of excavations.
00:22:16.780Well, yeah, and I'd heard, again, a lot of emotional discussion from leaders and communities, and they take those quotes in the paper when it ever comes to these days.
00:22:24.520We want to get those remains and repatriate them and bring them to their families.
00:22:27.880But nobody follows up with the media to point out, well, where's the families looking for them?
00:22:34.660We haven't even found any remains yet.
00:22:36.780But the legacy media leaves that wide open, and again, our academia does.
00:22:42.460We've got a really travesty happening here right now, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.
00:22:48.760So I think one of the ways people do this is they just declare that both the ground and the report is sacred.
00:22:56.120And if it's sacred in the eyes of certain people, you can't open it for discussion in a general way, or you can't dig into the ground to find out what's there.
00:23:04.160This, you know, this would be an easy out for anybody to claim, but certain people have a priority in making that claim and keeping other people from delving into finding out what the actual truth really is.
00:23:17.980And one of the perpetrators of this, of course, is the TRC Commission itself, who, you know, made certain claims that these areas are sacred and can't be violated.
00:23:29.380Well, I mean, if somebody's murdered, the police have an official responsibility to violate that principle because there's a higher order principle.
00:23:38.620That is, we want to find out who was murdered and how they were murdered and who's responsible and hold them up for punishment.
00:23:45.320So I see Brian's back in. I think perhaps there was a connection challenge or something there.
00:23:50.740And I'd like to, and Brian's got a, you know, of course, an extensive legal history, because this is outside of my realm of knowledge.
00:23:57.960We were discussing, though, I mean, if we perhaps have this many bodies or if it is happening, we should be seeing a forensic investigation.
00:24:04.940The reserves and others are resisting an actual, you know, exhuming of these sites.
00:24:09.180Is there a way that we could legally force them? I mean, if this is a crime scene, if this is a forensic state, if I had one in my backyard, I couldn't tell the police, yeah, there's a body back there, but I consider it sacred.
00:24:19.260So I'm not going to let you dig it up. They're not going to take that. They're going to dig it anyways.
00:24:23.560Is there a way we could compel further investigation on this to get some clarity?
00:24:27.080Yeah. And I lost my connection. Sorry. So I don't know exactly what has been discussed here.
00:24:34.480But yeah, this is, this is one of the big areas that Canadians should be discussing.
00:24:42.240What happened here? Why? We've got one of the biggest murder allegations in the history of Canada.
00:24:50.800We have the top chief in Canada, Archibald, claimed on BBC that tens of thousands of Indigenous students had been murdered in Canada and buried in spots all over the country.
00:25:08.260We have another one of our top Indigenous leaders claiming that there might be 25,000, maybe more of these people.
00:25:18.000And the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation claims that there are thousands of missing children who went to school and never returned.
00:25:27.940So if true, this would be probably the worst, by far the worst crime in Canadian history.
00:25:33.480So you'd think that the RCMP would want to get right in there and investigate immediately.
00:25:41.200Because if in fact it turns out, and I think it will, that Dr. Bolio's report is deeply flawed and that she was not detecting graves at all.
00:25:53.040Instead, she was detecting what was probably a sewage system built in the 1920s.
00:25:59.980And if in fact her report was done very incompetently, and as I say, I think that's what we're going to find.
00:26:07.920And if there are no bodies, if there are no murders, then the Canadian people have been through a heck of a bad year.
00:26:16.880The reputation of the country has suffered tremendously because we are now known as a spot where genocide occurred, where Indigenous children were murdered.
00:26:29.380And as I say, the research we've done makes it exceedingly unlikely that anybody, any child, was in fact murdered at a residential school.
00:26:43.280So other than one historical little footnote I'll tell you about in a minute, if I could.
00:26:50.620So the RCMP should definitely be, and what they should have done, I think my colleagues would agree with me, is immediately after this allegation was made, they should have taken over the investigation.
00:27:04.580They should have properly secured the area, and if necessary, they should have begun excavations, which would probably have consisted of, they probably wouldn't even have had to do so because they would have found out after questioning Bolio and realizing that she had not properly prepared a report.
00:27:24.960They probably would have done the investigation, found that these were not graves in the first place, and they could have laid this to rest probably within a week of investigation, but they didn't do so.
00:27:36.080So the question that we have to ask is why?
00:27:38.460Now, what we know for a fact is that Murray Sinclair, who used to be the commissioner, the head commissioner for the TRC, contacted some people and said, lay off this investigation.
00:27:55.220Now, I'm not accusing Sinclair of doing anything wrong.
00:28:00.940But what happened next, we have to know about that, because it sounds like some important politicians got involved, and I'll see if my colleagues agree with my suspicions here, but it sounds like some important politicians got involved, and then they got on the phone to some very important RCMP people and said, don't do your investigation.
00:28:25.620Stop, because you might be offending people or whatever the reasons.
00:28:29.200Now, for a politician to do that is very wrong.
00:28:32.840That's political interference at a top level.
00:28:35.700For the RCMP, if this is in fact what occurred, to simply not do their job and say, okay, well, we won't go and investigate, that is also very wrong.
00:28:46.600So I think what we have here is a political scandal, a very large political scandal that has not yet been fully explained.
00:28:56.980But yes, of course, the RCMP should have immediately gone involved and begun investigating properly.
00:29:03.360And this matter would have probably been laid to rest very quickly.
00:29:07.700And I don't know if my colleagues agree with me on that or not.
00:29:35.600And I think, Brian, I would even push a little bit further and said, you know, there's complicity between the government, the churches, the RCMP, and particularly the media on this issue.
00:29:48.380So it's not simply, you know, one sector of our society that's been bought off, but it's a whole swath of sectors of our society that aren't willing to open this to having a debate and try to find out what the actual truth really is.
00:30:04.920And deference, I think that's, you know, one doesn't necessarily have to get into the collusion or anything like that, but there is too much deference for anything that a so-called knowledge keeper says when they're just an individual who has a memory, which could be flawed, could have been implanted.
00:30:23.840We cannot rely upon these memories to proceed in terms of our action.
00:30:30.760We need actual evidence, not just memories, which could have been implanted with some kind of suggestions, which happens, has happened many times and happened in the 1980s with the satanic panic, which has a lot of similarities to what went on with respect to the Kamloops case.
00:30:47.620Well, in particular, I mean, I went to a boarding school for a period of my young life.
00:30:54.200It's certainly not Indian residential or anything like that.
00:30:56.420But I remember the late night rumor mills between kids as they chatter and myths and things that are going on, particularly in a boarding environment.
00:31:05.680I mean, and those things, if they aren't corrected, even if it's, you know, not malicious, but inadvertently turned into what you think was a real memory later in life.
00:31:14.440It's not trying to cause harm, but I mean, we're basing, yes, a lot of settlements, a lot of accusations on oral histories that are completely unproven.
00:31:24.100Well, I think they're more than, it even goes further than that.
00:31:28.340I think these are basically, my belief is that these are basically ghost stories originally, these stories about priests throwing babies into furnaces and killing people and secretly burying them with six-year-olds and that sort of thing.
00:31:42.360These are basically ghost stories that probably frightened little kids in residential school dormitories told each other.
00:31:52.220And we mentioned Kevin Annet, who is, he's one of the most destructive people in Canadian history.
00:32:01.380He has taken these stories, these ghost stories that little kids tell, and he has made them more sophisticated and believable, and he's spread them throughout the country.
00:32:14.740So they have been floating around many indigenous communities now for decades, for a couple of decades, and they've created a type of, and I agree with it with Francis, it's a type of hysteria.
00:32:26.300And so you have these stories, and suddenly, for some reason, our own media and our own politicians go along with this nonsense, and that's what this is.
00:32:38.160Priests throwing babies into furnaces or secretly burying them with the forced help of six-year-olds, those are conspiracy theories, urban legends, whatever you want to call them, ghost stories.
00:32:53.580But these crazy stories have been conflated with the legitimate desire by some indigenous communities to search for the burial sites, long-lost burial sites, and that's perfectly legitimate.
00:33:05.840But to have that conflated with all of these ghost stories has made a pure mess.
00:33:10.920And then on top of that, you have the media, which has not done its job.
00:33:14.500You have politicians who are forever, whatever the reasons, are exploiting this.
00:33:19.760And you've got indigenous leaders like Archibald making absolutely reckless statements, and they're doing great damage to the country, both domestically and internationally.
00:33:33.980Well, and so, I mean, before I let you guys go, I'll go one more round through, and I'll ask the hardest part, which is how can we deal with this?
00:33:46.200I mean, there's currently, as we speak, another GPR survey going on in a site up near Lacklebish, and they said they're going to have results coming out this winter.
00:33:54.340Well, I can put my fortune teller's hat on already and tell you that they're going to say, we found a bunch of anomalies.
00:34:02.520There'll be new orange T-shirts springing up on fences all over the place, and nobody's going to dig up and follow through on whatever they discovered.
00:35:20.840So, I'm very active and I have my own podcast called The Rational Space Disputations, where I invite people like Rod and Brian on to, you know, have different perspectives aired.
00:35:30.880But really, administration, university administration, what they are doing by making political statements all the time is they are directly acting against the ability of professors to critically examine issues.
00:35:47.360And this happened with the residential schools.
00:35:50.060It also happened with Black Lives Matter.
00:35:52.020And I think that's where administrators and university presidents and so on should stay out of making these political statements, because what it does is it creates a chill for those who might disagree and gives you the impression that this is the official position of the university.
00:36:10.300And what happens if you question what's being stated is that you will have all sorts of complaints filed against you, that you are a person who is not, you know, aligned with the quote unquote values of what the university is about.
00:36:26.340The university is about the free and open exchange of ideas.
00:36:30.440It's not about having a particular political position.
00:36:33.520And this is a huge problem that exists.
00:36:36.620And if we can get rid of that problem and restore universities to a place of open inquiry, then we will be able to discuss issues such as the unmarked graves and the residential schools.
00:37:17.680We need brave journalists that are prepared to take an honest look at this issue and not just write what their editors want them to write.
00:37:29.380And we have to have the editors of the national newspapers like the National Post and the Globe and Mail to get their heads out of their nether regions and start encouraging an honest discussion, not just having the authors like Tanya Kalaga and these emotional appeals not based on facts.