George W. Bush said famously to Congress after the 9-11 terrorist attack, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Similarly, George Orwell said in 1942 that “in practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle…is a bourgeois illusion.”
My employer, the Abbotsford School District, showed me that I was not aloof from the struggle by investigating me for “extremely serious misconduct.” I had relayed to senior history students the “most important news in Canada in 2021,” which was that the remains of 215 Indigenous children had been discovered in a mass grave in an apple orchard on the site of a former Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. This news led the Canadian government to declare itself guilty of genocide for having placed about one-third of First Nation children in long-ago-shuttered residential schools.
At the end of the partial and superficial investigation, I was fired. But, like the Joseph K. character in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, I knew I had done nothing wrong:
“But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true,” said the priest, “but that is how the guilty speak.”
My crime was in saying that most students who died while enrolled in these schools from 1883-1996 did so from disease, especially tuberculosis. Though factually true, the Abbotsford School District wrote to me in June 2021 that it was a time to hear from students “and not debate or challenge their emotional response to the news…. [Students] were struggling to make sense of the news and process the discovery.”
The problem was there was no discovery in Kamloops, and there still is no evidence whatsoever.
For the past three years the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have not conducted an investigation of the alleged murders; the archeologist’s report has been sealed by a local university (Simon Fraser University); and no excavation of the site has taken place.
The Abbotsford School District charged that “clearly it was not a time to play ‘devil’s advocate’ or to have a nuanced debate or discussion of the underlying reasons for these deaths…or push their thinking on the issue when students, as [with most] of the staff and general public, were struggling to make sense of the news.” It didn’t help that I was a history teacher: “Mr. McMurtry decided to use the class as an opportunity to teach a history lesson.”
The allegations kept changing. For example, they first accused me of saying “the deaths could not be called murder or cultural genocide,” but later they said that “my comments to students were inflammatory, inappropriate, insensitive and/or contrary to the school’s message of condolences and reconciliation.”
I noted, of course, that they replaced the word truth, as in Truth and Reconciliation, with condolences.
In time I realized that I was simply outside of an orthodoxy that was distorted by sensationalized headlines and cowardly journalistic practices. The woke employ a dual lens of good and bad, friend and foe. In their lynch-mob mentality, nuance and compassion get short shrift.
In the schools where I taught there is an administrative class of citizens who play the role of gatekeepers against unacceptable ideas, for they fear that a Trojan horse might get inside the walls and open the gate for other ideas to enter. In such a not-so-brave new world, you are with us or against us. There are no shades of allegiance, no nuance. As I was not with those administrators, they came for me.
I have been without a teaching job now for three years and my grievance against my employer is in abeyance while an investigation into my teaching by my regulatory body, the B.C. Teachers’ Regulation Branch (TRB), slowly unfolds. The TRB investigator’s report could take up to a year to write and a subsequent public hearing could consume another year of my life. The process is the punishment.
Jim McMurtry has taught in many subject areas in many places, including Switzerland where he was Principal of Neuchâtel Junior College. He lives in Surrey, B.C.
