I keep returning to a single image from a day I will never quite shake. The University of Victoria campus was alive with anger and care, and I was watching from inside the First Peoples House as the crowd gathered at Petch Fountain. They were there to do something simple and profound: stand between Indigenous community members and the spectacle of denialism. OneBC representatives—Dallas Brodie, then a sitting MLA, Frances Widdowson, Tim Thielmann, Jim McMurtry, and others—had arrived with the intention of casting doubt on the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. They wanted to turn grief into a debate. They wanted to make people question whether the children were there at all. But the community answered without haste, organizing on campus grounds to ensure that the denialists were not the majority that day. I remember the sound of voices, the weight of bodies moving together, the sense that this was not an argument but a defense of the living and the dead. And yet, in the months since, I have found myself asking a harder question: how could anyone be convinced that something so blatantly violent and mal-intended was not violent at all? That level of conviction cannot be explained away as simple cruelty. It grows from somewhere. It is fed by the shortcomings of individuals, yes, but also by the frailties of our nation-wide education system. When a country does not teach its own history, denialists will happily fill the silence with their own version. And if we do not recognize that, we will keep being surprised by the faces of people who look at mass graves and call them good intentions.
Maybe the most important thing you can do is listen to what denialists actually say. In 2025, researchers Edana Beauvais and Mark Williamson did exactly that. They surveyed nearly 2,000 non-Indigenous Canadian citizens and conducted media research focused on denialism, identifying nine popular rhetorical arguments that appear over and over again in denialist discussion. These arguments scale from the soft-spoken claim that residential schools were made to help Indigenous people to the more aggressive suggestion that the unmarked graves may not even contain Indigenous people. Both are dangerous. Both are designed to create doubt. The researchers also found something else, something that ought to shape every conversation about reconciliation: many participants who supported these arguments also distrusted the media, were drawn to weak conspiracy theories, and knew very little about residential school history. They were not necessarily evil people. They were under-informed people who had been given no reason to question the stories that flattered their sense of Canada. That distinction matters, because it points to a remedy. When the researchers exposed respondents to educational material, denialism decreased, and participants became more likely to explain the reasoning behind their answers. In other words, knowledge closes the gap that ignorance opens. Denialists are not created by accident. They are created by misinformation, by lack of education, and by the significant amounts of distraction that leave people with space to be misinformed. The answer is painfully clear: residential school denialism is rooted in white supremacy and empowered by knowledge gaps. We can wring our hands about it, or we can teach the truth. But we cannot do both.
Denialism is not a quiet corner of the internet anymore. It is growing, largely because of the global rise of right-wing politics, and Canadians are feeling restless and threatened by accountability. We have seen this close to home. On Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc land in the B.C. interior, white nationalists staged demonstrations while wearing cloth masks and holding a bold sign that read “Got Bones?” The question was not a search for truth. It was a taunt, aimed at survivors, at the families of missing children, at every person who has tried to make this country look honestly at its past. The Heiltsuk Tribal Council responded with a statement, and political leaders including Mark Carney, David Eby, Emily Lowan, and premier-elect Lorne Doerkson condemned the actions. But a condemnation is not the same as protection. It does not bring the bones back to the earth. It does not make the families feel safe. It does not stop the next demonstration from being planned on another piece of stolen land. The incident made something painfully obvious: not enough is being done to protect both Indigenous realities and Indigenous history. We treat denial as if it were an opinion, but when an opinion is built on the erasure of children, it is not just an opinion. It is harm. And harm requires more than a press release. It requires an active, ongoing refusal to let falsehood become memory.
And then, just over a week ago, the morning after the provincial election, white nationalists who call themselves the Loyal Pioneers displayed their group at the legislature in downtown Victoria. Their demonstration was not focally criticizing residential school history, but it carried the same current. White nationalism is not a philosophy that exists in a vacuum; it is the destination of a road paved with smaller lies. What creates a denialist is misinformation, and misinformation creates the space to harbor harmful ideas. When harmful ideas gain traction, morbid displays of hate and racism occur. We should not be surprised when the people who deny unmarked graves turn up at the centre of our democracy with symbols of the same old supremacy. Surprise is a privilege. Indigenous people have been telling us who these people are for generations. The rest of us are only now catching up. The Loyal Pioneers did not appear out of nowhere. They are the logical extension of a society that has refused to fully reckon with its founding violence, that has allowed denialism to masquerade as debate, that has protected a comfortable national story at the expense of children who never came home. The demonstrations are not aberrations. They are symptoms. And if we keep treating them as isolated events, as bad actors who simply appeared on a sunny afternoon, we will never have to face the truth that the soil in this country has been prepared for them by years of silence, distraction, and selective history.
In the face of denialism, conversations need to be refocused on Indigenous nations. That is not a gesture; it is a lifeline. Indigenous rights are under threat. In British Columbia, DRIPA—the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act—is potentially being repealed. At the federal level, Carney’s Bill C-39 looms. These are not abstract policy debates. They are decisions about whether Indigenous people will be allowed to protect their lands, their waters, their children, and their futures. They will devastate Indigenous communities if they pass. They will hurt the land we all live on, and they will hurt our tomorrow. It is strange that a country can mourn the children of residential schools in one breath and then strip Indigenous nations of legal authority in the next. But that is exactly what denialism has always done. It allows people to feel sorrow in the abstract without ever granting justice in the concrete. We need to stop centering the denialists altogether. Their questions are not honest questions; they are weapons. The real conversation should be led by Indigenous nations, by elders, by survivors, by the young people who are inheriting a world that still refuses to tell them the truth. What ideas and people should we be centering right now? That is up to the public, and the public is you. Every time you share an article, every time you ask a question, every time you refuse to let a denialist set the terms, you are choosing who gets to be at the centre of this story. Choose wisely.
So what do we do with all of this? We learn. We say the names of the children whose graves were found and the names of all the children who never came home. We sit with the discomfort of knowing that we live on land that was stolen and that the theft was marked by violence. We stop asking denialists to explain themselves as if they were engaged in good faith, and we start asking ourselves what we will do to make the truth impossible to ignore. Education is not a cure-all, but it is the beginning. We need to demand that residential school history be taught in every school in this country, not as a footnote but as a central chapter. We need to support Indigenous nations in their fight to protect their rights, and we need to understand that their rights are not a threat to us; they are a promise of a future in which this country finally keeps faith with the people it tried so hard to erase. We need to show up, as the UVic community did, not to shout down denialists but to stand around Petch Fountain and say, simply, we are here and we will not let you rewrite our grief into a debate. And we need to pay attention to what is coming. Readers can expect more on DRIPA and Bill C-39 in our next column, because this is not over. Denialism is not a phase. It is a test. The question is whether we will pass it. The answer begins with what we choose to learn, who we choose to center, and whose stories we refuse to let be buried again.