Sean Carleton: Uber Clown

Yesterday afternoon (March 29, 2024), University of Manitoba professor Sean Carleton once again provided his ad hominem commentary about “residential school denialism”. This time, he took aim at Jonathan Kay, a National Post columnist and editor of Quillette. In his posts, Carleton was criticizing Kay for having chapters in the “residential school denialist book” (Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools)). As a rebuttal to Kay’s pieces, Carleton maintains that “records have already confirmed 51 deaths at KIRS [the Kamloops Indian Residential School]” and that the Kamloops band is “doing the work” with respect to “investigat[ing] the discovery of 215 possible unmarked graves”. Carleton also castigates other authors of Grave Error for “promoting the false idea of a ‘mass grave hoax,'” which he claims his “research has debunked”. He then provides a link to an article written with Daniel Heath Justice that invented the term of “residential school denialism”.

It should be noted that, in point 5 of Carleton and Heath Justice’s article supposedly confronting the “disinformation” of “residential school denialism”, there is a link to an article about the “genocidal effects” of the residential schools. This article, by Ian Mosby and Erin Millions, falsely states that “more than 1,300 unmarked graves” were “recent discoveries”. One of these “discoveries”, according to Mosby and Millions, was the “remains” of “215 children” at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

While the other self-declared experts in “residential school denialism” – Daniel Heath Justice, Kisha Supernant and Niigaan Sinclair (son of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner Murray Sinclair) seemed to have gone quiet on the “denialism” file, Carleton continues to denounce his critics while refusing to engage with them. When Frances Widdowson wrote an article criticizing Carleton and Supernant’s idea of “residential school denialism” (“Critical Thinking is not ‘Denialism'”), for example, Carleton asserted that he did not engage with “denialists”, as Widdowson’s arguments were a trojan horse trying to justify “the colonial status quo”.

Carleton, however, along with Ryerson University professor Ian Mosby, is actually one of the perpetrators of the “mass grave hoax” concerning KIRS.

Professor Carleton is now pretending that the issue is the “51 deaths”, when none of these are claimed to have been clandestine burials. Not one parent with a child at KIRS has said that they “went missing”. None of Carleton’s work addresses the Kamloops band’s false claim in a press release on May 27, 2021 announcing “the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School” in an apple orchard next to what was the residential school.

In order for the Kamloops band to actually “investigate” its false claims about finding clandestine burials, three things need to happen: 1) the GPR report of Sarah Beaulieu needs to be released to the public; 2) the RCMP investigation needs to be reopened (it was halted because of intervention from Murray Sinclair); and 3) excavations must begin in what used to be the apple orchard.

If these things do not happen, the Kamloops band is obviously hiding the truth to justify the millions of dollars that it has received on the basis of falsehoods.