Protest Over A Book That No One Will Read

The New Westminster Times

The once quiet city of Quesnel, which sits along the fabled Cariboo Wagon Road and the upper reaches of the Fraser River in central B.C., was riven by news that the mayor’s wife, Pat Morton, was passing out copies of a book, causing the mayor to distance himself from his wife of over sixty years and causing hundreds of citizens to pack themselves into city council chambers on April 2nd to voice their displeasure. Ms. Morton tried speaking to council but the throng drowned her out. As in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 17th century, the judgment on anyone associated with the book was already in before the accused was brought to the fore.

The CBC reported “growing calls for Quesnel Mayor Ron Paull to resign after revelations his wife has been handing out a book that, according to promotional material from its publisher, questions whether residential schools were fundamentally harmful to Indigenous communities and people who attended them.”

I have not yet named the book as I am imitating Quesnel City Council which itself does not name the book it first denounced at a meeting on March 19th. None among the mayor and council have read the book and no one at the meeting – aside from Pat Morton and a forlorn-looking expert on Indigenous issues and contributor to the book, Frances Widdowson, who had driven in from Alberta – ever intends on reading it.

The book is titled Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools), its editors are C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan, and the contributors of the essays it contains are largely drawn from the Indian Residential Research Group (IRSRG), of which I am a member. My notoriety on the subject of residential schools comes from being walked out of classroom and career on May 31, 2021 for telling students that those students who died while enrolled in residential schools did so mostly from disease, especially tuberculosis.

In the summer of 2021 Drea Humphrey of Rebel News and independent podcaster Lauren Southern made their own documentaries on the dubious discovery of 215 child remains in a mass grave, which later was described as potential or suspected unmarked graves. In other words, the citizens of Quesnel waited three years before complaining about those who have been labelled “denialists” for doubting the discovery of unknown graves in an apple orchard on the grounds of an erstwhile residential school which was located in the centre of the reserve and near the centre of the City of Kamloops.

So-called denialists have been tinged by the unwillingness of the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops Shuswap) First Nation to excavate, to bring in international forensics teams, to invite the RCMP to investigate, to unseal the archeologist’s (Sarah Beaulieu) report. The reason why the IRSRG is determined to unbury the truth of the international story of secretly buried children is that the story led to the federal parliament declaring by unanimous motion on October 27, 2022 that Canada’s residential schools amounted to genocide.

The CBC has reported that the book’s publishers, True North and Dorchester Books, consider claims of residential schools traumatizing Indigenous people across generations and destroying their languages and culture as either “totally false or grossly exaggerated.” The publishers are said to have promised to “challenge the notion that Indigenous people were forced to attend residential schools and whether the residential school system can appropriately be defined as genocide.”

The authors of Grave Error are united in their view that news of the graves found in Kamloops is erroneous. Presumably, Pat Morton is also of this view, but she was drowned out and is uncomfortable speaking to the media, though possibly not as much as her husband the mayor is uncomfortable with her speaking to the media.

Mayor Ron Paull is still holding onto his mayoralty seat and to a lesser extent to his wife. Local Indigenous groups are up in arms. The local school district has banned discussion of the book. Media are turning their attention to a small forested city 670 kilometres northeast of Vancouver and far from almost all other urban areas. The issue is simmering across the country as more people are starting to ask why they haven’t seen any evidence of child remains or unmarked graves.

Pat Morton may appear to stand alone in Quesnel, but she’s far from alone.

About the author

Jim McMurtry, Ph.D. (Toronto) and former principal of Neuchâtel Junior College in Switzerland; Jim can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @jimmcmurtry01. McMurtry says that sticking to established historical facts is the hill that his career died on, but it’s also where he did his best teaching.