Countering Residential-school Denialism

A readout of the project “Canadians in Conversation: Strengthening Our Democracy by Coming to Terms with the Legacy of Residential Schools”

Residential school survivor Donna Debassige addresses participants before they begin one-on-one, in-person conversations confronting the legacy of these schools. Toronto, April 5, 2025

In her 2022 book “True Reconciliation: How to be a Force for Change” Jody Wilson Raybould argues that genuine action requires courage.

We had to summon precisely that to accept the challenge Kimberly Murray put to non-Indigenous Canadians in her Final Report on Missing and Disappeared Children.

The one overriding obligation she identified is to counter residential-school denialism. Once we accept that the institutions our country and our churches established to eliminate the identities of entire nations harmed children by the thousands, we owe a loyalty to that truth.  In her October 2024 report she writes that “denialism is a uniquely non-Indigenous problem; it therefore requires non-Indigenous people to actively work to counter denialism.”[1]

Given the work we do with non-Indigenous Canadians on residential schools, we felt obligated to answer her call.  To do so, we launched the program “Canadians in Conversation: Strengthening Democracy by Coming to Terms with Residential Schools.”

We had come across a promising method to generate public discussion of divisive topics, which showed great promise in changing attitudes – not through online confrontations between citizens holding opposite views but through face-to-face conversations. The original exercise run by a German media agency named Zeit Online was called “Germany Talks,” and it was organized during the 2017 election in that country when tensions were flaring over an unprecedented migration crisis.

“Germany Talks” generated a few surprising results. The first was that citizens responded with great enthusiasm to the opportunity to talk with strangers that disagree with them.  Second, the encounters produced no security incidents whatsoever; the conversations were invariably civil and respectful. Most significantly, though, the conversations revealed significant shifts in empathy.

On April 5, we pulled off our own version of this exercise.

We started with the Final Report.  In her chapter on Denialism, Kimberly Murray outlined five principal myths that dominate most public commentary by Canadians casting doubt on the history of residential schools.  These would form the basis of the face-to-face conversations.

We took to heart the importance of placing all our work under the scrutiny of those most directly impacted by the residential school system. To achieve this, we convened a group of residential school survivors recommended to us from First Nations, Inuit and Métis groups. These five survivors formed our Advisory Circle, and they vetted all aspects of this exercise.

We then turned to our volunteers in the Remembering Project to test out these face-to-face conversations. Hosted by the generous and impeccably well-organized Dr. Carol Kirby, we convened a live audience of 14 citizens in Ottawa. Paired into seven sets of strangers and equipped with the discussion questions, they held forth and provided feedback on the experience.

The next step was to design the event at which non-Indigenous Canadians would be invited into these conversations. In developing the project, we were fortunate to partner with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. With a decade of experience of engaging everyday Canadians on divisive and emotive topics, they have adapted learning from dozens of exercises into how to maximize impact so that skeptical participants walk away with their hearts changed.  One prominent lesson they learned is that participants in these dialogues make a major emotional investment when they agree to sit down face to face with a stranger with whom they disagree.  Their experience has shown that these participants cannot sit through long presentations before and after the one-on-one conversations without feeling overwhelmed.  That runs the risk of either losing the participant or triggering a negative response to the conversation.

We incorporated this insight by keeping the number of substantive presentations before participants began their one-on-one conversations.  To ensure legitimacy, we ensured that the final presentation to be heard before the conversations began would be with a residential school survivor.

All these preparations came to a head in Toronto on April 5. 

The venue was a conference called Democracy XChange, cohosted by Toronto Metropolitan University and OCAD University.  At noon, we entered the room reserved for us, an auditorium with 150 seats arranged theatre style, facing a large stage and large screen overhead. 

As participants entered, they were directed to a QR code so they could visit a website that listed the discussion questions and asked them to provide their opinions.  Their answers allowed the software operator to match the participants into pairs of people who disagreed with one another. In the meantime I explained the purpose of the exercise and we distributed a briefing note on the history of residential schools.

The most gripping presentation came from Donna Debassige, survivor of the St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School at Spanish, Ontario. Her searing account left an impact on many, some of whom accepted a smudge to help process the experience.

When Donna finished, participants located their partner and began their face-to-face conversations. Between 35 and 40 people attended, and with 32 responses to the survey we were able to match them into 16 conversation pairs.  The conversations appeared to be lively and engaging, and most were still going when we reached the 45-minute limit and asked participants to rejoin a central discussion.

The crowd was non-Indigenous with the exception of one First Nations woman, who identified as belonging to the Moose Cree of northern Ontario.  She expressed her gratitude for the exercise and commented that “at last non-Indigenous Canadians are talking about residential schools.”

After the event, participants were asked to provide feedback in the same app they had used for the survey.  Eight participants out of the 32 completed this feedback survey, a 25% response rate. Some highlights:

·       75% of participants greater respect in their fellow citizens after these conversations

·       63% felt greater trust in their fellow citizens after these conversations

·       63% felt greater trust in Canadian democracy

The 32 participants showed courage. They sat down with a stranger whose views differed from theirs. They debated an issue that goes to the heart of what Canada is as a country, of who we are as a nation.

Donna Debassige showed even greater courage, sharing painful memories from her childhood with a room full of non-Indigenous Canadians.

The task now remains to organize more such conversations, to reach more non-Indigenous Canadians and so to engender the empathy and trust that will help more of our fellow citizens to come to terms with the legacy of residential schools.

May we all have the courage that Donna, and our participants on April 5, displayed.

[1] See Sacred Responsibility: Searching for the Missing Children and Unmarked Burials – Interim Report Findings, page 4, chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://osi-bis.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/OSI_InterimReport_FINDINGS_June-2023_web.pdf