Stop Residential School Denialism
A repost from Karl Dockstader of One Dish One Mic
This is a repost, with permission, of a Facebook post by Karl Dockstader.
I opened up on air — really opened up — asking listeners to honour Survivors and help confront residential school denialism. And then a local listener emailed me personally to tell our people our trauma isn’t real.
This is why denialism is dangerous.
Residential school denialism isn’t harmless skepticism. It’s a tactic that erases children, minimizes abuse, and demands that Indigenous people “prove” our families’ trauma again and again, even though the truth has been documented for generations. These false claims hurt Survivors, and yes — they hurt those of us who speak out, too.
I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it because we all need to understand the harm and push back with knowledge, not misinformation.
If you want to learn more in a way that honours Survivors, listen to Indigenous voices. On One Dish, One Mic, our conversations come from a grounded, community‑rooted First Nations perspective, shaped by lived experience and guided by Survivors’ teachings. We talk about the facts, the context, and our shared responsibility to get this right.
We honour Survivors by refusing to let denialism take root.
One Dish, One Mic is live on Saturday at 10am, and rebroadcast at other times during the week (streaming and radio) on 610 CKTB.
Saturday 10:00 am - 11:00 am
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I have watched the "Making a Killing" video created by the OneBC political party. Given the drama between the two members and party staff, we will see how long this group will remain intact.
The video is a mixture of some pretty standard misunderstandings of individuals-vs-institutions, misunderstanding about what genocide is (hint: it's not the efficient murder of individuals by an entity not an ally to the British Empire, etc), misunderstandings around the difference between government title and fee-simple property (land purchased by a Chinese company on the West coast of this continent doesn't become part of China).
They even included some weird stuff about the gender binary ideology (anti-trans stuff, etc).
This is all wrapped within hyper-partisan commentary about the NDP, with this seeming to represent the "other side" in yet another false binary logical fallacy. I have written before about what I think about the policies of the BC NDP in relation to UNDRIP and related international human rights instruments.
https://r.flora.ca/p/should-you-be-upset-at-individual
I can discuss this if anyone actually cares to discuss why the type of "questions" that this group is asking aren't the "gotchas" they think they are. They may not even realize that they are engaged in denialism as they have ignored the actual evidence of the goals ("Gradual Civilization Act", "Kill the Indian, Save the Man", "kill the Indian in the child") of the relevant institutions, and are fixated on irrelevant details.
Whether there are 0 bodies or 500 bodies under former Kamloops Indian Residential School, the well documented goals of the Institutions of the Dominion of Canada are clear.
This isn't an accusation about individuals, regardless of citizenship or other affiliations, and no individual should feel personally implicated by this Truth, Reconciliation and Restitution process. This is a recognition of several (not only one) problematic policies of a set of institutions, and a goal to fix those policies and repair damage so the various peoples (plural -- not merely a group of individuals) can move forward.