Manitoba historian concerned residential school denialism will rise after Biden's apology in U.S.

As a young child, Dennis Saddleman's mother always ensured he knew how much she loved him, gave him kisses on his forehead and told him how beautiful he was.

That all changed when he was six years old, and those warm words turned ice cold when he was sent to the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The priests and nuns who were tasked with looking after him constantly berated him, beat him, barred him from speaking his language and practising his culture, and sexually assaulted him.

"I didn't know what I was getting into when I got there," he said in an interview on Parliament Hill in front of the Survivors' Flag, which is meant to honour and remember survivors of residential schools.

"I couldn't understand why they were treating us like we were dogs. They punished us even though we were innocent."

More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend residential schools, the last of which closed in 1996. An estimated 6,000 children died in the schools, though experts say the actual number could be much higher.

Many survivors who testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission shared stories of abuse in those institutions that were similar to Saddleman's, and their words are included in its reports.

Increasingly, however, those stories are subject to what historian Sean Carleton calls "residential school denialism."

He said denialism is a strategy used to twist, misrepresent and distort basic facts about residential schools to shake public confidence in the stories of survivors, and in the process of truth and reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Canada.

"Overall, the goal of denialism is to protect the colonial status quo," said Carleton, who is an assistant professor of history and Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba.

He also said some media outlets have been used to spread this disinformation.

That includes misrepresenting the number of children who died from tuberculosis in the schools by saying a lot of people at the time died from the disease, and leaving out the fact the federal government's policies exacerbated the impact of the illness in residential schools through overcrowding, poor nutrition and a lack of proper sanitation and ventilation.

Another common theme Carleton sees is that residential schools were "well-intentioned." Denialists ignore that the stated goal of the institutions was to disrupt the connections of Indigenous families and accelerate their assimilation into settler Canadian society.

"It's a constant sowing of seeds of doubt in things that we don't need to be doubtful about, because we've already established the truth about them," he said.

Some people even deny that students died at the institutions at all, even though that has been documented through Canadian and church records.