Findings shaky, says witness

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Researcher John Siebert has greatly angered Native people in the last few weeks by stating that harm caused to First Peoples' culture and society by the residential school experience has been overstated, and the idea of compensation for that harm is flawed.

His comments appeared in two stories in the National Post and have been used as a springboard for one conservative columnist to launch a bitterly worded attack on First Nations for the redress they're seeking for the harm inflicted in the schools.

The stories generated several outraged letters from residential school plaintiff lawyer Jon Faulds, Aboriginal Healing Foundation chair Georges Erasmus, university professors, and others.

Faulds accused Siebert of being an apologist for church and state who tries hard, but whose research methods fall short.

Erasmus scolded that it is "callous and arrogant to claim that the thousands of people who weep when they talk about residential school, and who have spent a lifetime untangling the knots of history, are weeping over nothing."

Although the stories attracted widespread criticism of his methods from respected academics and brought a formal rejection of his conclusions from the United Church, Siebert is not willing to criticize reporter Richard Foot for the way his comments were portrayed. But in an interview with Windspeaker on April 10, Siebert appears to switch gears, admitting the cultural harm is real and saying he is not interested in working with, or for, conservative or anti-Indian forces in this country.

Siebert is a Mennonite man who worked for the United Church of Canada from 1992 to 1998. He holds a masters degree in theology from St. Michael's College at the University of Toronto. He testified for the United Church during the Port Alberni Indian Residential School trial in 1998 and is now working on a book about his research.

By using Indian Affairs' annual reports and some Statistics Canada information, he created six charts that show that only one-third to one-half of Native children in school attended residential school. That, he said, suggests that some of the claims about the wide-ranging devastation wrought by the school system might be exaggerated. But he admitted that his access to records and his understanding of what those records reveal is far from complete.

"I certainly would welcome other people taking a look and challenging what those charts say," he said. "First of all, have I done it accurately, and second, some of the conclusions I draw, are they valid?"

Siebert also acknowledged that government census takers and others who seek to collect information in First Nations communities are viewed with distrust, unable to get the whole story. He also confirmed that he could not make adjustments in his assessments of the available data to compensate for this problem.

"Well, no, not an adjustment. Anybody looking at Statistics Canada information is always going to ask the question: 'How valid is the data?' In this case, it's the data that's available," he said.

One of the sharpest criticisms leveled at his work is that he was working for the church against the government. Both have been found to be vicariously liable for the actions of a convicted sexual predator who worked at the Alberni school. A decision is expected soon on how that liability will be shared. Churches are claiming that a decision that finds them to have equal liability to the government will force them into bankruptcy.

Siebert's comments show he clearly believes the government should be held solely liable. He pointed out that the majority of Indian Affairs annual budgets from 1900 to 1965 were related to education.

'The churches played a role, but the employees were federal Crown employees. So these statistics reinforce, in my view, that the federal Crown was predominant in its education system and that the documentation that's available also indicates that," he said.

In another controversial finding, he noted tha most Native people identified themselves as Christians in census reports taken before the residential schools were created. In the mainstream press stories he said that fact led him to conclude the schools weren't responsible for any loss of traditional religion. He admitted to Windspeaker that the data used to form those conclusions might be shaky.

"From the census data, people self-identifying with traditional religions is very low. And that's challengeable, I have no question," he admitted.

Given the well documented pressure to assimilate applied on Native people by clergymen and Indian agents, he also conceded there was a lot of incentive for Native people to lie about their religious beliefs when questioned by census takers.

"It could very well be that people said, you know, 'I'm going to tell them I'm Presbyterian or Anglican or whatever, but really I practice my own religion in a quiet way because of all the stigma or prohibition,'" he said. "At minimum, you have to consider the possibility that even if those statistics weren't great, many people had decided prior to the Indian Affairs residential school system being put in place that they would self-affiliate with one of the Christian denominations. In other words, mission activities preceded the schools. That's what the statistics indicate but it's not provable."

He emphasized that his findings and opinions are not exhaustive and his work should not be held up as an expert's opinion.

"For residential schools, to give you an idea of what kind of document cache there is out there, I can tell you from my experience that if I gathered all the United Church documents from all of its history on residential schools, I could put them on a reasonable size board room on the table in boxes. For the federal Crown, you'd need a football field, if that would hold them. Frankly, no one has ever seen everything and no one ever will. There's just too much."

And many, if not most, of the most important documents arenot easily accessible, he noted.

"Indian Affairs has its own holdings for residential school documents that is restricted access. You can't get into it, although I've seen some of it," he said. "Since 1994, the size of the Indian Affairs closed holdings has tripled in size. Since the Royal Commission. The trigger is discovery and production of documents for litigation. And the trigger is even more sharply tuned. I started finding documents the government wasn't aware of and I put them into public review through stories. So they found out, 'Holy smoke! We haven't got everything that there is.' Several calls went out from Indian Affairs headquarters to the regions [saying] 'What have you got sitting in file cabinets? Send it here ASAP.'"

Despite the fact that his work is being enthusiastically welcomed by conservative, anti-Indian people, Siebert said he is not anti-Indian.

"I am very sensitive to the fact that some of your readers are extremely upset with me personally."

He faced criticism by academics who said he should not have been talking to the press about his conclusions until they had been peer reviewed or assessed by senior academics in related fields. He also was knocked for drawing conclusions before seeing all the pertinent documents. He responded by saying that it's not his fault if all the documents are not available for review.

"If . . . there are documents that people like myself have not seen, then there is a big, big problem because the Crown is under an obligation in these legal proceedings to produce all relevant documentation. I am one of the few people who, from the church organization side, has systematically reviewed the production of documents by the Crown. I've done that in three different provinces with more than one church organization. I'm putting in the qualification here. I'm not speaking for the United Church. I think that was made clear. But if I haven't seen it and the Crown hasn't produced it, something that is relevant, then ther is a problem with the Crown's production of documents.

Siebert agreed that the denial and resentment among non-Native Canadians who have been forced to face an unsavory part their history explains why his comments received so much attention. He did not dispute that racism is a factor in this debate and that his work would be welcomed by racists.

"To me, that's a fact. There is a problem. . . I'm not interested in what I convey about residential schools being used as general attacks on Aboriginal and treaty rights. . .

"There were all sorts of people from the Canadian Alliance and fellow travellers on to me immediately. . . Alliance types give me the creeps, policy-wise," he said. "But there is a problem with how residential school issues have evolved in terms of litigation, even if it's just a perceptual problem. And that is, the numbers are piling up for the purpose of financial settlement and sexual abuse is a horror and it's a sin and it's a crime and it's going to be dealt with in civil litigation. It has to be. The problem when you get into the range of people suing in relation to residential schools is that the vast majority of claims have to do with cultural loss and it's very difficult for people to understand how that could have been a deliberate policy of the Crown in schooling. "