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History on Trial
The continuing saga of Canada’s residential schools
APR 24

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The following piece, published by the prestigious British journal History Reclaimed, was written by star researcher Nina Green.
All I would add to the introduction below and Green’s careful analysis is that of the small proportion of children who attended an Indian Residential School, the average length of attendance was 4.5 years, yet another sign they were not forced to attend these institutions against the will of their parents or guardians.
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History on Trial. The continuing saga of Canada’s residential schools
Nina Green
History Reclaimed
November 7, 2024

Readers will be aware of the scandalous campaign waged against Canadian churches for running residential schools for indigenous children at which, it is claimed, many children were murdered. Though there is no evidence for the claim, it is estimated that more than a hundred Christian buildings in Canada have been subjected to arson, destruction and defacement.
Meanwhile, an industry has grown up dedicated to the extraction of apologies and reparations which has become ever more strident in its accusations and demands. History Reclaimed has followed these events and published several articles about them because the campaign is, in essence, an assault on the past. Ideas about native minorities, and about educational practices, were simply different circa 1900. People and institutions are being judged anachronistically and Canadian society is being divided and undermined because activists are deliberately misapplying contemporary nostrums to a history that was different.
Below, in an update, Nina Green gives a further snap-shot of the situation as activists seek to prosecute history itself in the International Criminal Court.

Canadian taxpayers have recently shelled out $10 million on a report, written by Kimberly Murray, into ways of commemorating Indian residential school children who went missing from these establishments, presumed murdered by their teachers and guardians. Ms Murray, a member of the Kahnesatake Mohawk Nation is ‘Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools’. The problem, however, is that there is no evidence to support the loud and insistent claims that indigenous children were deliberately killed in these schools: none whatsoever.
This being the case, the report must find another way of beating up both the Roman Catholic Church in Canada, which ran most of these schools, and Canada itself. It does so by advocating that both these entities should be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court (ICC) under the Rome Statute which established the ICC and which came into force in 2002.
But there is a further problem: Article 24 of the Rome Statute, to which Canada is a signatory, provides that prosecutions at the ICC are prohibited for events which occurred prior to 1 July 2002, and the last Indian residential schools closed in 1998.
According to the Murray report, the way to get past the unequivocal non-retroactivity of the Rome Statute is to claim that ‘Canada’ and the ‘Catholic Church’ are guilty of a continuing crime against humanity because they continue to conceal what happened at Indian residential schools.
Thus, at a seminar on this subject on 30 October 2024 chaired by Beverley Jacobs, a law professor at the University of Windsor (who explained to the audience that since 1994 she has been looking for a way to prosecute ‘Canada’ for genocide and crimes against humanity), one of the co-authors of the Murray report, Professor Mark Kersten of the University of Fraser Valley, explained in detail what needs to be established in order to bring about a successful prosecution against ‘Canada’ and the ‘Catholic Church’.
The first step – and the step on which everything else in the prosecution depends – is to prove that there was an enforced disappearance, i.e., that the children at residential schools were deprived of their liberty by force. But that point cannot be established at all, and any prosecution against ‘Canada’ or the ‘Catholic Church’ on this basis would fail from the outset.
Why? Because there are thousands of extant application forms which establish that Indian parents actually applied to send their children to Indian residential schools. It was an official Department of Indian Affairs requirement that an application form be signed by a parent before an Indian child could be admitted to an Indian Residential School.
Moreover, the Department of Indian Affairs’ annual reports establish that only about one-third of Indian children ever attended an Indian residential school, a fact which undermines the claim that indigenous children were deprived of their liberty by force, as does the fact that attendance at Indian residential schools was completely voluntary until 1920. Even after 1920, when the Indian Act was amended, an indigenous child did not have to attend an Indian residential school if there was a day school on their reserve. The Federal Day School Settlement established that there were 699 Indian Day Schools in Canada. About one third of Indian children attended them. The other third didn’t go to school at all.
In short, one-third of indigenous children attended Indian residential schools on the basis of applications signed by their parents; another third attended Indian day schools on their reserves from which they returned home to their parents at night; and the remaining third were uneducated.
There is yet another problem with the prosecution plan: under Article 25 of the Rome Statute, only a ‘natural person’ – a living human being – can be prosecuted. In other words ‘Canada’ as a country, or its federal government as an entity, or the ‘Catholic Church’ as an entity, cannot be prosecuted in the International Criminal Court under the Rome Statute for crimes against humanity.
Who, then, is to be prosecuted? A living representative of the federal government – the current Minister of Justice, Arif Virani, for example? Or the current minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Gary Anandasangaree? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau? Former Prime Ministers Jean Chretien, Paul Martin or Stephen Harper? Or a Member of Parliament such as Leah Gazan, whose great-grandfather had a positive experience at an Indian residential school? Or the Pope, as a representative of the Catholic Church? Or William McGrattan, President of the Canadian Council of Catholic Bishops? Or other individual Canadian Bishops? Or, in fact, all of the above, and others as well? Canadians should be told.
The absurdity of the situation is now clear. For the past two years Canadian taxpayers have allowed Kimberly Murray to collect together indigenous activists from across the country at her largely secret ‘National Gatherings’ in major Canadian cities. Anyone who watched the two days of proceedings at her final National Gathering in Gatineau on 29-30 October 2024 will have seen the outcome, as evidenced by this CBC article in which Indigenous leaders rejoice at the prospect of ‘going international’ with criminal prosecutions.
But notably missing at this final National Gathering was any talk of reconciliation. It was all about punishing Canada and the Catholic Church at the ICC for their attempts to provide education and health services to indigenous children. It was also about silencing so-called ‘denialists’ via an amendment to the Criminal Code through Bill C-413 making it a criminal offence to deny the abuse and murder of children at these residential schools. The Murray Report not only ignored the facts of history, but threw reconciliation out the window and opted for vengeance.
Should Minister of Justice Arif Virani use Kimberly Murray’s 1000-page report as anything other than a doorstop? You be the judge.
Nina Green
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