Voice actor regrets commercial doubting residential school harm

SASKATOON The veteran broadcaster who was paid to read a Frontier Centre for Public Policy advertisement questioning the trauma caused by Indian residential schools said he had concerns about it at the time, and now accepts it was a “bad decision.”

Roger Currie, who described himself as a “commercial voice,” said he had no control over the contents of the ad, and severed his relationship with the Winnipegbased think-tank after it began circulating on social media over the weekend.

“I was concerned about that one in particular, and I’m now sort of satisfied that it was a bad call that I made. I should have walked away from it,” Currie said in an interview from his Winnipeg home Monday afternoon.

Earlier in the day, the Frontier Centre appeared to have scrubbed the advertisement, which asked whether Canadians are “being told the whole truth about residential schools,” from its website.

The audio ad claimed that it is a “myth” that Indian residential schools robbed Indigenous children of their childhoods, their language and culture, and intergenerational trauma — harm passed from parents to children to grandchildren.

Later in the afternoon, the ad was replaced with an edited print version of comments in the radio ad, and included a link to an essay published by the think-tank in August titled Myth versus Evidence: Your Choice.

The paper’s author, Mark Dewolf, has previously written about his time as a non-indigenous residential school student.

The Frontier Centre declined an interview request. In a statement, the organization said the advertisement was for its radio commentary program which is “designed to reach a wider nontraditional audience for our thinktank across the prairies.”

“Roger Currie, a main target of this social media attack, is simply a paid professional voice and has no editorial control,” the message stated, noting that the advertisement was intended to promote Dewolf ’s paper.

Currie said the content of the ad “certainly doesn’t represent my views,” and he accepts that the more than 100 years during which the residential schools operated was a “bad chapter in Canadian history.”

The ad being broadcast over radio airwaves was first reported by Oursask.ca, a Saskatchewan blog. It was not immediately known which or how many radio stations the advertisement appeared on.

University of Regina professor James Daschuk, who studies Indigenous health and wrote a history of government policy affecting Indigenous people on the prairies entitled Clearing the Plains, suggested the ad was “wilfully ignorant.”

Daschuk said the Frontier Centre for Public Policy is thought to be a generally reputable right-wing think-tank, and the ad risks “undermining their own credibility” given the preponderance of evidence showing the harm caused by residential schools.

Established with the passage of the Indian Act in 1876, the Indian residential school system was funded by the federal government and administered by various churches. The last residential schools in the country closed just over 20 years ago.

The system is widely understood to have caused great harm to generations of Indigenous children

I’m now sort of satisfied that it was a bad call that I made. I should have walked away from it.

who were separated from their families and stripped of their language and culture, with the aim of assimilation.

In 2006, the federal government announced a $2-billion compensation package for approximately 86,000 survivors and family members. Two years after that, thenprime minister Stephen Harper delivered a public apology for the harm caused by residential schools.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in the summer of 2015, delivered the final report documenting the history and effects of the Indian residential school system. The report included 94 recommendations.

In an interview Monday afternoon, Treaty Commissioner of Saskatchewan Mary Culbertson said she was “disappointed” and “upset,” and “appalled” that any radio station would allow such an ad to be broadcast.

Culbertson said repeating opinions that fly in the face of a mountain of evidence not only revictimizes residential school survivors, but hinders the collective effort needed to educate society about their history and effects.

“Repeating it causes damage over and over and over again.”