This article was originally published on the Woke Watch Canada website. It has been republished with the author’s permission.
By Nina Green
Did two lengthy and exhaustive RCMP investigations establish that there was widespread physical and sexual abuse at Indian residential schools?
In fact, they did not.
The 1990 Frum interview
The claim that there was widespread sexual abuse at Indian residential schools originated in 1990 when Phil Fontaine, head of the Manitoba Assembly of Chiefs, was interviewed by the CBC’s Barbara Frum. Fontaine attended the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba, and claimed in the interview that he had been sexually abused at the school and that every boy in his Grade 3 class suffered the same abuse. When questioned by Frum, Fontaine declined to describe the nature of the abuse. However in a Statement of Claim filed in a class action lawsuit in 2005, Fontaine stated that he had been ‘made to disrobe and bathe in the presence of the priest‘. Since every boy in his Grade Three class had endured the same sexual abuse, it is clear that the sexual abuse Fontaine and his classmates suffered was having to take a weekly shower. The shower was supervised by school staff to ensure that the boys put their dirty clothing in bags for the laundry, showered without mishap or mayhem, and got the right clean clothing for the coming week. It was a routine procedure, and there was nothing sexually abusive about it. Had Fontaine told Barbara Frum that at the time, Canada would be a different country today.
After Fontaine’s allegation in 1990, claims of abuse at Indian residential schools became more and more frequent. Today, most Canadians believe that sexual and physical abuse at Indian residential schools was widespread.
However two lengthy RCMP investigations – one in Manitoba and one in British Columbia – point to a different conclusion.
Let’s look at each in turn.
(1) The RCMP investigation into the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School
In February 2010, the RCMP major crimes unit in Manitoba began looking into abuse at the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School. The following year, the RCMP launched a formal criminal investigation.
Why the RCMP initiated a major criminal investigation into the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School has never been revealed. It may have had something to do with Phil Fontaine’s 1990 allegations to Barbara Frum, particularly since Fontaine’s Chief of Staff, Bob Watts, during his tenure as Interim Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, told the Globe and Mail on 1 January 2008 that he had ‘met three times with police in the past year to advise them on the accusations former students are preparing to make’.
Whatever its origins, the RCMP investigation into the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School was extensive. Over a decade, more than 80 RCMP officers spoke with more than 700 people across North America. They even did ‘door to door canvassing‘. 75 witness and victim statements were obtained. The RCMP also combed through thousands of archival documents in Manitoba and Ottawa including ‘student and employees lists and quarterly [attendance] returns’.
However no charges were laid until two months after the Kamloops Band’s false claim that it had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children‘ at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. According to a CBC article on 27 July 2021, at that time the RCMP finally ‘forwarded its findings to the Manitoba Prosecution Services to review and determine whether charges [were] warranted’.
In the end, only a single charge was laid. A 92-year-old Oblate priest, Arthur Masse, was arrested in June 2022 and charged with indecent assault. The complainant, Victoria McIntosh, alleged that he had kissed her and ‘fondled her above her clothing’ in a bathroom at the school at some time between 1968 and 1970. Masse was acquitted, as McIntosh’s identification of him ‘was not sufficiently reliable’. Her evidence at trial was inconsistent with statements she had made in 2013 both to the RCMP and in her application for compensation under the Independent Assessment Process (IAP).
In passing, it is worth noting that the fact that no other charges were laid indicates that this decade-long RCMP investigation found no corroboration of Phil Fontaine’s claim to Barbara Frum that every boy in his Grade 3 class was sexually abused in the same way he (Fontaine) had been abused, which is perfectly understandable if the alleged sexual abuse consisted, as discussed above, of nothing more than a routine supervised weekly shower.
Ironically, according to CTV a civil claim of sexual assault against a high school student in the Fort Alexander area in the 1970s was recently filed against Fontaine himself.
(2) The province-wide RCMP investigation of 15 BC Indian Residential Schools
The other major RCMP investigation of physical and sexual abuse in Indian residential schools which essentially came up empty took place in British Columbia during the years 1995-2003.
In the spring of 1992, the RCMP in Port Alberni received complaints against Arthur Plint, a former supervisor at the Alberni Indian Residential School. Charges were laid, and a preliminary hearing was held in September 1994. However before trial, Plint pled guilty to all outstanding charges, and was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment on 21 March 1995. (TFR, infra, pp. 12, 38)
While the Plint investigation was underway, the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council (NTC) completed a study which was published in 1996 under the title Indian Residential Schools: The Nuu-chah-nulth Experience (TNE). The study was conducted in 1992 by Ron Hamilton, a young activist who had spent the previous four years working towards a BA degree at the University of British Columbia (TNE, p. xxi). Hamilton had never attended an Indian residential school. However he had a strong connection to the Alberni Indian Residential School through his mother, Nessie Watts, who was employed for 17 and a half years in the school laundry (TNE, pp. xxii, xxv), and his uncle, George Clutesi, who had been employed at the school as a janitor, and taught Indian song and dance to the students there.
Much could be written about Hamilton’s study, including the fact that much of it consists of his own personal opinions. However for the moment, suffice to say that Hamilton’s study was the origin of the province-wide RCMP Task Force which investigated BC’s 15 Indian residential schools for eight years. As stated on p. 1 of the undated RCMP Task Force report (TFR), the 110 individuals surveyed and interviewed by Ron Hamilton were the raison d’etre for a meeting on 3 November 1994 between unidentified members of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and the Port Alberni RCMP:
On the morning of November 3, 1994, representatives of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council met with investigators of the Port Alberni R.C.M.P. and described having recently interviewed more than one hundred area residents, each of whom were alleging physical and sexual abuse at one of several Native Indian Residential Schools located throughout the province.
It seems the representatives of the Tribal Council provided no actual evidence to the RCMP at the 3 November 1994 meeting. However they clearly left the RCMP with the impression that more than a hundred additional victims were prepared to come forward. From the RCMP Task Force report, p. 12:
This investigation [i.e. the Plint investigation] was still ongoing that same November when the detachment was advised there were upwards of one hundred additional victims living in the immediate area.
This ‘advice’ to the RCMP turned out to be false. The RCMP Task Force report states that only ‘a very small number’ of the 100 victims ‘followed through and actually contacted the police’ (TFR, p. 38). Moreover when the RCMP asked to see Ron Hamilton’s study which was the basis for that claim, the Tribal Council passed a motion putting it under lock and key. From p. 217 of The Nuu-chah-nulth Experience (see attachment Nuu Chah Nulth Experience 216 17):
December 2-3, 1994 the following motion was passed, following inquiries from the RCMP.
That all data with respect to the residential school study be placed under tight security and situated where only a selected few know of its location, that no information or a copy of the study be released to the RCMP without authorization of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council and we place a gag order with respect to the media.
Despite the fact that the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council had apparently not provided the Port Alberni RCMP with any evidence that ‘more than one hundred’ individuals had been abused, the detachment nonetheless concluded that it could not handle this potentially massive investigation without assistance. A series of meetings followed with the Courtenay Sub-Division and RCMP “E” Division headquarters. There was also a meeting with Wendy Grant-John, at the time Vice-Chief of the Assembly of First Nations. That meeting appears to have been pivotal in getting a province-wide investigation underway. From p. 218 of The Nuu-chah-nulth Experience (see attachment Nuu Chah Nulth Experience 218 19):
Following RCMP inquiries about the NTC study in November 1994, and a meeting with Vice-Chief Wendy Grant, the RCMP announced that they would undertake a province wide investigation of residential schools.
For the next six months, no investigation took place. According to the RCMP Task Force report (p. 6), the time was taken up with ‘residential school workshops throughout the province, briefing local bands and council members, conducting media briefings, and appearing on radio talk shows’. With those aspects out of the way, the report states that:
the Task Force eagerly awaited the hundreds of disclosures that were anticipated.
However the expected avalanche of disclosures didn’t immediately materialize (TFR, p. 106). Only 45 disclosures had been received by 21 October 1995, although the pace eventually picked up, and at the conclusion of the investigation, by which time civil lawsuits against the federal government and the churches had exploded (TFR, pp. 16, 112), the RCMP had opened 453 victim files and 396 suspect files (TFR, p. 55). Since many of the 453 victims made more than one allegation – for example an allegation of physical assault and an allegation of sexual assault – the 453 victims made a total of 974 separate allegations (p. 57).
The Task Force report emphasizes that every single allegation which could have resulted in a criminal charge was investigated – often twice – no matter how unlikely it appeared that a criminal charge would result (TFR, pp. 13, 116). In fact, the measures the RCMP took to ensure that every single allegation was thoroughly investigated were unprecedented, including the development of a victim-driven investigation Protocol (TFR, p. 13), the use of Indian activist Charlene Belleau (who had been heavily involved in earlier investigations at Williams Lake) as a liaison (NTC, p. 217), the hiring of a private civilian researcher, Christine Mellema (see Task Force Report, Appendix 2, and McMahon, infra, p. 60), and the obtaining of 133 search warrants for records held by churches, religious orders, and the federal government (TFR, p.111). However, as the report admits (pp. 1, 65):
Despite all the effort and resources expended on this file, relatively few criminal prosecutions resulted’.
So what went wrong?
In the first place, as mentioned above, it is particularly notable that although the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council representatives had gotten the province-wide investigation started with the claim that there were more than 100 victims in the immediate area of Port Alberni alone who would presumably be prepared to file charges, only ‘a very small number of people in this group followed through and actually contacted police’ (p. 38), a fact which raises serious questions about what the representatives of the Tribal Council told the Port Alberni RCMP at the meeting on 3 November 1994 which jump-started the province-wide investigation. Given the fact that the initial premise for the investigation was dubious, it should not have come as a surprise to anyone that there were so few prosecutions.
As also might have been expected, prosecutions were limited by the fact that many of the alleged suspects were deceased. That should have been obvious before the investigation started, given that the Task Force was prepared to receive allegations going back to the 1930s (TFR, p. 15). Moreover in a substantial number of cases the victim could not identify the suspect by name or in any meaningful way, and the civilian researcher hired by the RCMP had to investigate thousands of church and federal government records to even determine who the suspects vaguely identified by victims might actually be. This meant that whether a suspect accused by a victim was actually alive or dead was often completely unknown to RCMP investigators for months or even years. In many cases, the identification of a suspect after these extraordinarily time-consuming and expensive efforts merely confirmed that the suspect was dead, and there could be no criminal prosecution – and, of course, no prospect of the suspect clearing him or herself of the allegation.
Moreover there were many disclosures of student on student abuse, including sexual abuse (TFR, pp. 52, 64). Fully ten percent of sexual assault suspects at the Alberni Indian Residential School, for example, were students (TFR, p. 68). To complicate matters further, some victims were identified by other students as suspects (TFR, p. 55). These disclosures of student on student abuse could not be criminally prosecuted because the suspects were minors at the time of the alleged offences (TFR, p. 64).
As well, allegations of physical assault could not be prosecuted because in many cases the ‘assaults’ described were ‘quite minor’ (TFR, p. 63), and use of the strap, slapping, or hitting a student with a ruler were usual methods of discipline at the time in public schools in BC. In other words, for the most part what victims were describing to the RCMP in hundreds of instances as criminal physical assaults were either minor incidents, or merely the usual punishments meted out to public school students throughout BC in accordance with the standards of the time (TFR, p. 64).
What, then, of the actual criminal prosecutions, all of which were for sexual abuse?
The Task Force report describes the prosecution of only 14 adult males for sexual abuse (pp. 34-42). However as the report itself admits, eight of these prosecutions involved individuals who had either been acquitted, convicted, or were under investigation before the Task Force was conceived of.
Of the remaining six prosecutions, four eventually came to nothing for various reasons.
Thus, investigations initiated by the province-wide Task Force itself – as opposed to investigations already underway or concluded before the Task Force was in operation – were only responsible for the conviction of two individuals – Gerald Matthieu Moran and Donald Bruce Haddock (pp. 39-41). This result is confirmed by the table of convictions in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Appendix 3, and by former TRC counsel Thomas McMahon’s article, Indian Residential Schools Were a Crime.
In other words, after eight years, the expenditure of thousands of hours of police investigative time and well over a million dollars (TFR, pp. 1, 101), only two individuals were convicted who had not been previously investigated prior to the Task Force’s existence.
What can Canadians learn from these two RCMP investigations?
Circling back to the original question – Did two lengthy and exhaustive RCMP investigations establish that there was widespread physical and sexual abuse at Indian residential schools? Clearly, they did not.
The Manitoba RCMP investigation into the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School went on for a decade and culminated in only one criminal prosecution in which the accused was found not guilty at trial.
The BC RCMP province-wide investigation into 15 BC Indian residential schools went on for eight years and resulted in the conviction of only two individuals who had not been previously investigated or convicted before the province-wide Task Force was set up.
In both investigations, the RCMP went all out, and left no stone unturned. It could even be argued the RCMP were over-zealous in their investigative procedures, and disrupted entire Indigenous communities while conducting their investigations. And yet no convictions were obtained in the Manitoba investigation, and only two new convictions were obtained in the province-wide investigation in BC.
Contrary to what Canadians have been told, the RCMP investigations found that physical and sexual abuse were not rampant at Indian residential schools, certainly not in any way that could be established via thorough criminal investigation.
Canadians will have to come to grips with that fact. It will not be easy, given the widespread belief by Canadians in unsubstantiated and unverified Survivor statements.
