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Dead Wrong: How Canada Got the Residential School Story So Wrong
Dead Wrong is a follow-up to Grave Error, published by True North in late 2023. Grave Error instantly became a best-seller because it debunked the Kamloops Narrative about “unmarked graves” and “missing children” at Indian Residential Schools.
Why is another book needed? Simply because the struggle for accurate information continues. Very few of those who spread unsubstantiated rumours about “discoveries” of “unmarked graves” holding the remains of “missing children” at Kamloops and other Indian Residential Schools have admitted their errors.
Dead Wrong gives the straight story about episodes involving the Kamloops Narrative, such
The shocking unwillingness of the New York Times to retract its headline about “mass graves” at Kamloops.The attempt of the city council at Quesnel, BC, to drive the mayor from office because his wife gave away ten copies of Grave Error.The firing of high school teacher Jim McMurtry because he told students the truth—that most students who died at residential schools succumbed to TB.The so-called documentary Sugarcane, which was nominated for an Oscar even though it was riddled with errors about St. Joseph’s Residential School at Williams Lake, BC.The attempt of the Law Society of BC to entrench the Kamloops Narrative in its educational materials, even though the falsehoods were pointed out by member Jim Keller.All this and much more is contained in Dead Wrong, which picks up where Grave Error left off. If you liked Grave Error, you’ll love Dead Wrong.
Why is another book needed? Simply because the struggle for accurate information continues. Very few of those who spread unsubstantiated rumours about “discoveries” of “unmarked graves” holding the remains of “missing children” at Kamloops and other Indian Residential Schools have admitted their errors.
Dead Wrong gives the straight story about episodes involving the Kamloops Narrative, such
The shocking unwillingness of the New York Times to retract its headline about “mass graves” at Kamloops.The attempt of the city council at Quesnel, BC, to drive the mayor from office because his wife gave away ten copies of Grave Error.The firing of high school teacher Jim McMurtry because he told students the truth—that most students who died at residential schools succumbed to TB.The so-called documentary Sugarcane, which was nominated for an Oscar even though it was riddled with errors about St. Joseph’s Residential School at Williams Lake, BC.The attempt of the Law Society of BC to entrench the Kamloops Narrative in its educational materials, even though the falsehoods were pointed out by member Jim Keller.All this and much more is contained in Dead Wrong, which picks up where Grave Error left off. If you liked Grave Error, you’ll love Dead Wrong.
- GenresNonfiction
357 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 27, 2025
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March 9, 2026
This 2005 book is a sequel to the 2003 book “Grave Error”, which cast doubt on the allegations of Indigenous children being buried in front of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Although it is more than 400 pages long, index included, it is not such a formidable read as it first appears, since it is a large-print book, and a compilation of reports, many of which have appeared elsewhere, and which someone interested in Indigenous issues may already have read. The compilers have also wisely decided to expand the scope of the book slightly to include Eric Schloss’s narrative of the now closed Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton and Michael Melanson’s report on the “Land Back” movement.
Jim McMurtry wrote a chapter on PM Mark Carney’s father, Robert Carney, who was the principal at a day school in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, where many of the children were Indigenous. Although he never taught at a residential school, the elder Carney was a defender of the residential schools. He wrote: “Unlike most other boarding schools . . . Aboriginal boarding schools were multi-purpose institutions that took in many children who suffered from forms of social, physical and emotional distress . . . The fact is that Aboriginal schools always played a major role in caring for children in need.” He also wrote that “much of what the missionaries did with respect to aboriginal schooling was intended to help native people to adjust to a changing environment, and that the missionaries and their sponsoring churches were foremost among newcomers to the country in helping to do this.”
McMurtry’s chapter is adapted from a book called “The Scarlet Lesson” published on May 14, 2025, two months after Mark Carney became Prime Minister. So unfortunately, it makes no mention of Carney throwing his dead father under the bus in April 2025 during the election campaign. This is how more than one commentator characterized PM Carney’s response when a female journalist asked him what he thought of his father’s views on the residential schools. Carney said he thought his father was wrong and went on to regurgitate the Trudeauvian view that the residential schools were evil and a blot on Canadian history, not deigning to counter any of the factual statements that the elder Carney had made in their defence. Prime Minister Carney said he was looking to achieve reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, but pursuing a false, Manichean narrative about residential schools, even to the point of denigrating the memory of his own father, was a strange way to go about it. If there is not a need for a sequel to “Dead Wrong” to point out this iniquitous reply of Carney’s, there is surely at least a need for a second edition of the book that would update McMurtry’s chapter and do this.
Frances Widdowson, who is still appealing her disgraceful firing as a professor at Mount Royal University, wrote two chapters for the book: “Collaboration No More: How the Powell River name-change debate turned nasty” and “Criminalizing ‘Residential School Denialism’: What are the political and academic implications?” The story Widdowson recounts in the first of these chapters is truly in the “If you invented it, no-one would believe it” category. The drive to change the name of the Sunshine Coast town came from the belief that it was named after Israel Wood Powell, a 19th century BC politician who had only the most tenuous connection with Indigenous residential schools. However, it seems that the town was actually named after an earlier Powell, Edward J. Powell, the Chief Cartographer of the British Admiralty Hydrographic Office, responsible for creating many of the charts for that part of the British Columbia coast that includes Powell River. Needless to say, the cartographer had no connection with Indigenous policy in any way.
It would be great for academic freedom in Canada if Widdowson won her battle for reinstatement at Mount Royal University. If that happened, it should also be covered in an updated edition of “Dead Wrong.”
The claim that the residential schools promoted “cultural genocide”, i.e. that they attempted to erase Indigenous languages, seems much more plausible than the outlandish claim that they were like Nazi death camps, dedicated to exterminating the children they were supposed to teach. However, Ian Gentles and Pim Wiebel, in their chapter “’A Saga of Terrible Abuses.’ Really?”, note that a 2002-3 study by the First Nations Regional Survey found the surprising result found: “Those that attend a residential school were actually more likely to understand a First Nations language ‘relatively well’ or ‘fluently’ compared with those who did not attend (74.8% vs. 43.6%). This association held within each age group (18-34, 35-54 and 55+ years old) . . . Residential school attendance was also positively associated with the other language measures tested: speaking a Frist Nations language relatively well or fluently; speaking a First Nations language fluently (only) and having a First Nations language as primary language.” So much for cultural genocide.
People forget in their vilification of Indigenous residential schools that for children on small isolated reserves, the only way to get an education in the higher grades now is to go to a school off-reserve with mostly non-Indigenous children, and where the pressures to assimilate are inevitably greater. Also, the residential schools often had teaching materials for First Nations languages, which would not be available in off-reserve schools.
I hope this book finds many readers. Even if you have already read “Grave Error” you should find “Dead Wrong” a fascinating and helpful read.
I have appended a few detailed comments on the book, which I may add to later.
“In the 1940s, the residential schools in the North provided instruction in vernacular languages, including syllabics.” (247) [A syllabic writing system is a set of written characters where each symbol represents a syllable (usually a consonant-vowel pair), rather than single consonants or vowels. Japanese hiragana or katakana are the obvious syllabic writing systems for a major language, but they are also commonly used for Canadian Indigenous languages.]
“The principal of the St. Anthony School in Onion Lake, Sask. Was fluent in Cree syllabics and taught it to his pupils.” (247) [In this case, the syllabics were probably used to teach the pupils the Cree language, as the passage suggests, but Cree syllabics are used to represent a number of Indigenous languages. Although called Cree syllabics, they were initially devised for the related Anishinabe or Ojibwa language by James Evans, an English-born Methodist missionary living in Manitoba.]
“this is an amendment that the Law Society should have been grateful that a lawyer drew their attention, and adopted it immediately.” (371) [This is ungrammatical, and the first part would be better rewritten as “this is an amendment to which the Law Society should have been grateful that a lawyer drew their attention. . . “]
“And further, the left asks rhetorically, who is more historically marginalized, and therefore worthy of constant cultural protection afforded no other people group, than the exalted first inhabitants of the New World?” (371-2) [The author, James Pew, didn’t decide between “people” and “group”, so stuck them both in.]
Jim McMurtry wrote a chapter on PM Mark Carney’s father, Robert Carney, who was the principal at a day school in Fort Smith, Northwest Territories, where many of the children were Indigenous. Although he never taught at a residential school, the elder Carney was a defender of the residential schools. He wrote: “Unlike most other boarding schools . . . Aboriginal boarding schools were multi-purpose institutions that took in many children who suffered from forms of social, physical and emotional distress . . . The fact is that Aboriginal schools always played a major role in caring for children in need.” He also wrote that “much of what the missionaries did with respect to aboriginal schooling was intended to help native people to adjust to a changing environment, and that the missionaries and their sponsoring churches were foremost among newcomers to the country in helping to do this.”
McMurtry’s chapter is adapted from a book called “The Scarlet Lesson” published on May 14, 2025, two months after Mark Carney became Prime Minister. So unfortunately, it makes no mention of Carney throwing his dead father under the bus in April 2025 during the election campaign. This is how more than one commentator characterized PM Carney’s response when a female journalist asked him what he thought of his father’s views on the residential schools. Carney said he thought his father was wrong and went on to regurgitate the Trudeauvian view that the residential schools were evil and a blot on Canadian history, not deigning to counter any of the factual statements that the elder Carney had made in their defence. Prime Minister Carney said he was looking to achieve reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, but pursuing a false, Manichean narrative about residential schools, even to the point of denigrating the memory of his own father, was a strange way to go about it. If there is not a need for a sequel to “Dead Wrong” to point out this iniquitous reply of Carney’s, there is surely at least a need for a second edition of the book that would update McMurtry’s chapter and do this.
Frances Widdowson, who is still appealing her disgraceful firing as a professor at Mount Royal University, wrote two chapters for the book: “Collaboration No More: How the Powell River name-change debate turned nasty” and “Criminalizing ‘Residential School Denialism’: What are the political and academic implications?” The story Widdowson recounts in the first of these chapters is truly in the “If you invented it, no-one would believe it” category. The drive to change the name of the Sunshine Coast town came from the belief that it was named after Israel Wood Powell, a 19th century BC politician who had only the most tenuous connection with Indigenous residential schools. However, it seems that the town was actually named after an earlier Powell, Edward J. Powell, the Chief Cartographer of the British Admiralty Hydrographic Office, responsible for creating many of the charts for that part of the British Columbia coast that includes Powell River. Needless to say, the cartographer had no connection with Indigenous policy in any way.
It would be great for academic freedom in Canada if Widdowson won her battle for reinstatement at Mount Royal University. If that happened, it should also be covered in an updated edition of “Dead Wrong.”
The claim that the residential schools promoted “cultural genocide”, i.e. that they attempted to erase Indigenous languages, seems much more plausible than the outlandish claim that they were like Nazi death camps, dedicated to exterminating the children they were supposed to teach. However, Ian Gentles and Pim Wiebel, in their chapter “’A Saga of Terrible Abuses.’ Really?”, note that a 2002-3 study by the First Nations Regional Survey found the surprising result found: “Those that attend a residential school were actually more likely to understand a First Nations language ‘relatively well’ or ‘fluently’ compared with those who did not attend (74.8% vs. 43.6%). This association held within each age group (18-34, 35-54 and 55+ years old) . . . Residential school attendance was also positively associated with the other language measures tested: speaking a Frist Nations language relatively well or fluently; speaking a First Nations language fluently (only) and having a First Nations language as primary language.” So much for cultural genocide.
People forget in their vilification of Indigenous residential schools that for children on small isolated reserves, the only way to get an education in the higher grades now is to go to a school off-reserve with mostly non-Indigenous children, and where the pressures to assimilate are inevitably greater. Also, the residential schools often had teaching materials for First Nations languages, which would not be available in off-reserve schools.
I hope this book finds many readers. Even if you have already read “Grave Error” you should find “Dead Wrong” a fascinating and helpful read.
I have appended a few detailed comments on the book, which I may add to later.
“In the 1940s, the residential schools in the North provided instruction in vernacular languages, including syllabics.” (247) [A syllabic writing system is a set of written characters where each symbol represents a syllable (usually a consonant-vowel pair), rather than single consonants or vowels. Japanese hiragana or katakana are the obvious syllabic writing systems for a major language, but they are also commonly used for Canadian Indigenous languages.]
“The principal of the St. Anthony School in Onion Lake, Sask. Was fluent in Cree syllabics and taught it to his pupils.” (247) [In this case, the syllabics were probably used to teach the pupils the Cree language, as the passage suggests, but Cree syllabics are used to represent a number of Indigenous languages. Although called Cree syllabics, they were initially devised for the related Anishinabe or Ojibwa language by James Evans, an English-born Methodist missionary living in Manitoba.]
“this is an amendment that the Law Society should have been grateful that a lawyer drew their attention, and adopted it immediately.” (371) [This is ungrammatical, and the first part would be better rewritten as “this is an amendment to which the Law Society should have been grateful that a lawyer drew their attention. . . “]
“And further, the left asks rhetorically, who is more historically marginalized, and therefore worthy of constant cultural protection afforded no other people group, than the exalted first inhabitants of the New World?” (371-2) [The author, James Pew, didn’t decide between “people” and “group”, so stuck them both in.]
March 16, 2026
Wow! Another amazing read after the original Grave Error book. I so admire the brave & courageous authors/contributors of the book as they simply try to get at the truth, and refuse to be silenced or cancelled by the shameful leftist progressive activists, media, politicians & grifters. Well worth the read normie Canadians!
December 27, 2025
Worthwhile sequel to Grave Error given the overwhelming misunderstanding of Indian Residential Schools in Canada, among Canadians and the public globally.
March 17, 2026
EXCELLENT. Everyone needs to read this book.
Read
April 5, 2026This should be must read for all students. You can't have reconciliation without truth.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews