It’s Wednesday, November 12, and I’m on the road to Kamloops, driving through scenery that goes from rainforest to semi-arid and back again. Due to the recent rise in publicly acceptable white nationalism, I’ve been keeping an eye out for grievance-culture warriors. But today’s gang wasn’t hard to find. In fact, they’re currently on a speaking tour of unsanctioned events at unwilling universities across B.C. — most likely for the benefit of the video cameras they keep rolling. Conflict, manufactured or otherwise, sells. 

No longer content to voice their opposition to equality and societal fairness strictly at dinner parties, Dallas Brodie, Frances Widdowson, and Jim McMurtry had brought their anti-Indigenous road show to the Thompson Rivers University campus on this overcast afternoon.

All three have been fired for sharing comments on Indigenous peoples that have been deemed harmful. All three continue to share those same comments, and others, at staged events across the country. On this day, Widdowson wore a sign reading “What Remains?” on one side. On the other, a picture of Dallas Brodie holding a sign reading “Zero Bodies” next to an Every Child Matters roadside sign.

Things did not go smoothly, but I suspect that was by design. The three are in the process of making what they describe as a documentary film, although they don’t inform those appearing on camera that they may appear on screen. A significant breach of documentary ethics.

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Getting booed on camera seems to be catching on in far-right circles, as we saw with Danielle Smith at the latest UCP AGM. By that standard, the event was a success, as shouts of “nobody wants you here!” “go home!” and many other more colourful comments were hurled at McMurtry, Brodie, and Widdowson by those present in an outdoor area on the TRU campus.

But they weren’t the only ones yelling. The trio attracted a small group of 20 or so supporters, and although outnumbered those supporters were loud and proud, shouting from-the-hip talking points about residential schools that wouldn’t have seemed out of place at a Klan rally. 

“It was for their own good,” “where would they be without the schools?” and “we have a good life, why are you trying to make it worse?!” were hurled at students and members of the Kamloops community who showed up to oppose the outdoor event.

I was there because I saw a Twitter post asking “where are the 215 bodies?” alongside pictures of several outspoken residential school denialists. It certainly wasn’t the first post I’d seen denying some element of the history of residential schools, but it caught my eye because it featured TRU’s official logo. The juxtaposition was jarring: why would a public university with a high percentage of Indigenous students be hosting a group of deniers like this?

It turned out the event was entirely unsanctioned, but despite threats to have them trespassed from the university, it went ahead anyway.

Cranks and grifters have been peddling revisionist history for as long as I’ve been alive, but lately I’ve seen a rise in claims that Indigenous people are complicit in a wide-spread ‘hoax’ to siphon off tax dollars they don’t deserve trending more widely in Canada. And like so many bad ideas lately, it has its roots in the United States.

The idea is to rehabilitate what is widely recognized as anti-Indigenous racism by academics and experts, providing an air of legitimacy for those who want to question the darker chapters of this country’s history. 

Political power is the goal, but grievance animates a movement which seeks to reclaim what it feels has been lost. Much of the rise in publicly acceptable racism and the rejection of Indigenous sovereignty over the past decade can be traced back to folks with similar feelings. 

The usual suspects 

Widdowson, fired by Mount Royal University in 2021, led the charge. She was flanked by Dallas Brodie, fired from the Conservative Party of B.C. last year, and Jim McMurtry, fired as a Teacher on Call in Abbotsford in 2021. The three took turns fielding oppositional questions that challenged their bold claims — foremost among them that there is no proof any bodies are buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, at least not until the assumed bodies revealed by ground-penetrating radar have been unearthed. 

They may be correct, but the demand to unearth the remains of what could be more than 200 gravesites at the Kamloops Indian Residential School is a question that remains a work in progress, requiring coordination with other Indigenous communities, according to the Tkʼemlúps te Secwépemc (TTeS).

Widdowson has spent years claiming Indigenous peoples are complicit in widespread fraud at the behest of “lawyers and consultants,” in what Widdowson calls the “Aboriginal Industry.” Despite her beliefs, which have been published as far back as 2008, she said the following last year.

“For the record, I think describing the Kamloops case as a hoax is questionable and perhaps unhelpful,” Widdowson said in a video, labeled as a documentary, posted to YouTube in October of 2024.

‘It is clearly she and her fellow travellers who have the agenda’

Widdowson was removed as a professor in the department of policy studies at Mount Royal University in 2020. A subsequent arbitration process found her expulsion was not warranted.

Despite the finding, MRU says Widdowson was not asked back by the university due to the ‘breakdown in relationship’ in the time between the firing and the arbitration.

Perhaps a large part of both the reason for the expulsion and the reason the relationship remains at an impasse can be found in Widdowson’s co-authored 2008 book, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation.

Widdowson co-wrote the book with husband Albert Howard, although the pair’s ideas were largely denounced by other academics.

“Though they proceed from what is no doubt a sincere acknowledgement of ‘the terrible social conditions in aboriginal communities,’ reads a scathing 2010 entry in the Ottawa Law Review, “their answers are, unhappily, wrong, and in the final analysis, pointless.”

A more recent piece in a 2023 compendium titled Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) received a similar summation in a 2024 review.

“At law, there is a presumption of regularity in the administration of public affairs. Allegations of bad faith must be supported by irrefutable evidence,’ wrote Richard Butler in The B.C. Review in 2024. ‘The lack of irrefutable evidence here makes Widdowson’s allegations irresponsible and offensive. It also tends to discredit the rest of her arguments, as well as the arguments of those who ride with her. It is clearly she and her fellow travellers who have the agenda.”

Since being fired by MRU, Widdowson has taken to spreading her published views through a series of campus visits across Canada. 

Despite cautionary messages and warnings that she would be trespassing, she shows up anyway, claiming any failure to welcome her with open arms represents an infringement of her academic freedom and freedom of expression. 

Widdowson is no longer a tenured professor, but even if she were, some of the things she chooses to claim as truth would not be protected expression, says Sean Carleton, a history professor at the University of Winnipeg, who has researched and written extensively on residential school denialism.

Carleton is familiar with the methods Widdowson, Brodie, and McMurtry are using, and knows where these tactics can lead if left unchecked.

“You can’t even give them a lot of credit. Because this is just a copy and paste of the tactics of the American far right. You stage these events at universities because you know there will be people who will be critical of [your message],” said Carleton in an interview with Ricochet, noting what he sees as the anti-intellectual motivations of this movement. “It’s also part of their attack on universities as a source of knowledge.’’

The movement Carleton is referring to has many names, but can seem inextricably linked with the steady rise of anti-Indigenous racism in B.C. — and appears to be led of late, in the public square and on the floor of the B.C. Legislature, by Dallas Brodie and the OneBC Party. 

Power, or the loss of it in the wake of Stephen Harper’s defeat in 2015, has acted as a catalyst for grievances on the political right that have grown steadily ever since, says Dr. Sheelah McLean, education professor at the University of Saskatchewan and co-founder of the Idle No More movement.

“[The reason] Harper’s Conservative government was wiped off the map was Idle No More,” McLean said in an interview with Ricochet. “What’s happened since is those same people who were wiped off the map, they have been organizing. They have a lot of money and a lot of resources and they’re working really hard to try and take back what they lost.”

Now, a new party has been formed around a rookie MLA and her willingness to speak about Indigenous Peoples in terms usually only used behind closed doors. Polls have OneBC at around eight per cent support, just months after its creation. 

The Overton Window marches ever rightward 

After Dallas Brodie was fired from the Conservative Party of B.C. for mocking Indigenous people’s testimony during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission interviews, another Conservative MLA, Tara Armstrong, also left the party. Together, they launched OneBC in June. 

The pair appear to want to lead a crusade against Indigenous sovereignty and other ‘woke’ ideas from the bully pulpit of their new political party.

The term ‘woke’ originated as a catch-all for being aware of societal issues, but now it has been co-opted by those who use it as a pejorative to describe trans liberation, wheelchair access in buildings, non-white people getting hired, etc. as societal ills. Brodie and Armstrong have decided it is high-time the now pejorative term be used in BC’s legislature.

In question period on November 20 in the legislature, Premier David Eby responded to a question from OneBC as follows.

“They have their position. It’s obvious. It’s an unfortunate position given the history… for [Indigenous] people, high school kids, to be listening to members promulgating fictions that suit their agenda in the face of the well-documented history in this province… It is reprehensible, disgusting, appalling… I run out of words to describe what they’re trying to do,” said Eby responding to a question from OneBC.

“The member is completely wrong when she thinks of reconciliation as a cost. In our province, reconciliation represents, we believe, in the order of $100 to $150 billion dollars in economic activity. Tens of thousands of jobs… the member wants to rip that up because of her ideology, which is anti-Indigenous unambiguously. Unambiguously racist. And it is incredibly problematic that we have these voices in our Legislature.”

Eby went further after the legislature voted down a private members bill introduced by OneBC to end Truth and Reconciliation Day. 

“I fully support any effort to recall these members because there’s not a chance that the people who voted for them had any idea about the agenda they’d be advancing in this house.”

Kukpi7 Roseanne Casimir of the Tkemlups te Secwepmec (TteS), and the TTeS have issued a public call for the resignation of Brodie, as have the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and the Assembly of First Nations.

A review of personal X accounts belonging to Brodie and Armstrong, finds that both campaigned on what could be described as anti-Indigenous racism, xenophobia, transphobic ideas, and eliminating the B.C. income tax altogether. Since its creation in June, the OneBC account has shared similar content. 

Brodie and Armstrong were also both at the TRU event, where footage for Widdowson’s upcoming documentary film was recorded without notifying those present.

Documentary shoots typically announce themselves, even in public spaces, so their approach raises ethical questions — and perhaps questions about the good faith nature of the campus visits. 

A booming harvest of content

‘‘Part of what’s going on is staging events to harvest content,” says Carleton. “They’re all doing different things to platform and profit from [residential school] denialism. This event is somewhat unique in the fact that they had all three come to hold space together and overlap their different audiences. Although, of course, they are very similar audiences.”

Jim McMurtry, who was fired from his job as an on-call teacher at Robert Bateman Secondary in Abbotsford following comments he made in 2021, was also at the TRU event, where he continued his one note campaign to expose the “real reason” children died at Residential Schools. 

McMurtry, who ran for OneBC in the recent BC election and won just over 500 votes, was the target of a string of complaints and disciplinary actions from 2019 through to his firing in 2022. That’s when he says he chose to begin speaking publicly about what he believes to be true. 

“I answered a girl who described the school’s teachers (Sisters of St. Ann, and Oblate priests and brothers) as ‘murderers who tortured students to death by leaving them out in the snow,’ by saying the children who died tragically while enrolled in residential schools did so mostly from disease,” McMurtry wrote in January of 2023.

His rhetoric has shifted both in tone and intensity since then, as was evident during the TRU event. McMurtry showed up wearing a sign repeating the statement he was fired for, an assertion that Indigenous children died from tuberculosis, and were not murdered. 

“Why are you perpetuating a lie to university students? That’s what I don’t understand.” McMurtry asked. “What could be more important than passing on to future generations an honest representation of the past?”

McMurtry claimed, in front of the crowd, to have a PhD “on the subject.” In reality, his PhD is in the philosophy of education. 

“I have not seen any evidence of any murdered children. So why are you saying that there is? Give me a single name. Give me a photograph. Give me a death certificate that says ‘murdered.’ Give me evidence of a murderous priest or nun.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, volume four specifically titled Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, focuses on the more than 3,000 children that have been found to have died while enrolled at residential schools.

The report also indicates there’s a high possibility the number of deaths is substantially higher, but the records were not well kept and some evidence is no longer available.

Duncan Campbell Scott, largely credited with the implementation and administration of Residential Schools, stated himself that half of the students who ever attended the schools did not make it to adulthood.

Although the exact reason for the widespread death rate has not been pinpointed, tuberculosis was rampant in schools due to mismanagement, and potentially by design.

WIddowson, Brodie, McMurtry et al are practicing a form of denial of aspects of the residential school experience that is growing more common.

The importance of telling the truth about genocide

The introduction of the final report on Truth and Reconciliation affirms that Canada committed genocide:

“Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group, and biological genocide is the destruction of the group’s reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized, and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.

In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things.” 

For over 15 years, Widdowson has been practicing indirect bigotry, and critics argue that this results in harm both directly, and through those who take her position as a former professor as an indication of legitimacy. 

Mistakes were made in the media upon the release of the ground penetrating radar information, says Carleton, but hinging an entire campaign on “the mass grave hoax” is not a great strategy.

‘We discovered that only six per cent of all early publications surrounding the announcement of the 215 anomalies used terms like mass grave or murdered children,” Carleton told Ricochet.

After looking at more than 300 articles on the subject, he notes those errors have been largely corrected.

Eroding public confidence is one of the main goals of these critics, says Carelton, adding that the public backlash toward progressive ideas is the desired byproduct.

Carleton says the sight of students, like those at TRU, standing up to messages like the ones Widdowson and Brodie offer is a sign that all is not lost.

“I think people are starting to see through these tactics. That’s why it’s important to name [them].”

Federally, a private member’s bill, Bill C-413 has been introduced to make denying residential school harms a criminal offense.

‘[Residential School] survivors, families, and communities have a right to be safe from violence, safe from hate,’ said MP Leah Gazan on October 31 regarding her intended amendment to the Canadian Criminal Code. “There’s a difference between free speech and inciting hate. Residential school denialism is inciting hate, full stop,” Gazan said. She added, “we cannot reconcile if there’s still a denial of the truth.”

Criminalizing hate speech has occurred in Germany, specifically hate speech denying a genocide, and something similar may be needed in Canada to correct the rise in similar harmful speech with similar roots, says McLean.

“If someone is spouting hate speech  are people really safe in that space?’ McLean added. ’It is, absolutely, white supremacy. The heart and the violence of white supremacy.”

In academic settings, according to Carelton, speech also has limits.

“Not even students are protected, were they to use hate speech in a classroom setting,” said Carelton, noting another tactic he sees being used by those that choose to deny Canada’s residential school history. ‘We have seen a lot of that backlash. Not just on the political side, but we’ve seen academics try to give an intellectual sheen to anti-Indigenous racism. We see this most clearly in the work of Thomas Flanagan.” Widdowson has zero peer-reviewed studies or papers published on residential schools or what she calls the “Aboriginal Industry.”

Much of this mess can be traced back to the original intent of residential schools, as outlined by Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald to the House of Commons in 1883: 

“When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”