This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By Christopher Dummitt, June 26, 2026
Five years after the Kamloops allegations, has the Canadian Historical Association begun to reckon with its own role in the controversy?
In the aftermath of the May 2021 announcement at Kamloops, the CHA released a statement referring to “the recent confirmation of hundreds of unmarked graves at former Indian Residential Schools.” Now, as media outlets begin to pare back their language and acknowledge the faults in their reporting, is the CHA acknowledging its own?
So far, no.
Back in 2021, I was part of a group of 60 academics who wrote an open letter decrying the lack of scholarly standards demonstrated in the CHA’s Canada Day Statement. We were lambasted by leaders in the profession—largely on ad hominem grounds, for being too male, too old, and too focused on critiquing what some called the false idea of “activist” scholarship.
Very little attention was paid to the fact that our letter specifically highlighted the genuine mistakes and horrors of residential schools—and that we were focused on insisting that academic standards require verification, truth-seeking, and the protection of dissenting voices. It is precisely viewpoint diversity that allows the errors of groupthink to be corrected.
Five years later, I decided to look at what the CHA is doing now and assess whether there has been any improvement. The CHA’s annual meeting was held last week in Charlottetown. Using Claude AI as a research tool, I analyzed all of the 113 sessions and 307 papers in the 2026 programme to assess the topics covered, the language used, and the political orientations on display.
This kind of analysis has its limitations. It is based only on paper titles and so cannot tell us about the content or quality of the work itself. That said, it is still useful for determining the topics presenters consider worthwhile, and for detecting trends in the language used, the assumptions embedded in that language, and the viewpoints on offer—and, most importantly, the viewpoints not on offer.
I coded each paper and session on three dimensions: first, can we detect any political orientation from the title: Left-leaning, Right-leaning, or neutral? Second, does the title use activist language? Third, does the paper focus on specific identity groups, and if so, which ones?
The good news is that many historians are doing inquiry-based work on Canada’s past without imposing normative political assumptions in their basic framing. This is not a profession in which every academic has an activist agenda—that kind of blanket characterization simply doesn’t fit the data.
That said, advocacy-oriented scholarship is a significant presence at this year’s meeting. Approximately 39 percent of the papers can be categorized as Left-leaning based on their titles and framing. When we move to session-level analysis—looking at how whole sessions are packaged and advertised—the orientation becomes more pronounced: 57.7 percent of sessions are framed in ways that make their Left-leaning assumptions visible.
What about conservative perspectives? Are there any Right-leaning papers?
Not one. I could not find a single obviously Right-leaning paper or session in the entire programme. There is a single paper on former Progressive Conservative PM Joe Clark, but it’s not about conservative policy and seems to be an analysis of the coded ways in which he was dismissed as not being sufficiently manly.
The contrast is between a significant minority of papers containing normative assumptions and language that would be recognized as politically Left rather than Right, and a larger group that is more neutral or at least ambiguous. It is possible that actually reading many of those neutral papers would reveal clearer political orientations. But on the evidence of titles alone, at the CHA meeting you can be on the Left or you can be in the centre. There is no Right.
This is also a profession in which many scholars examine the past through the lens of identity groups: 63 percent of papers identify at least one such group as a primary subject. But not all groups receive equal attention. Overwhelmingly, this is a profession focused on Indigenous people and Indigenous history. Despite Indigenous Canadians comprising roughly 5 percent of the population, more than 28 percent of the papers address Indigenous topics.
You might defend this focus on the grounds that such topics were neglected for too long, or that Indigenous Peoples have a far longer history on this land than others. Both things are true, or at least they used to be. But in academic circles, Indigenous history has been a prominent and well-funded field for decades. This is not a recent discovery.
More telling is which groups are absent. There is no mention in the entire programme of long-standing Canadian communities like the Scots, the Irish, the English, or the Germans. The term “Anglo-Saxon” appears once, but only as a description of something being imposed on Indigenous people. “Loyalist” also appears, but the most prominent use is in a paper about Black Loyalists. The Irish, who played an enormous role in building 19th-century Canada, appear nowhere.
Rather than reflecting Canadian demographics broadly, the identity groups discussed at this year’s CHA meeting largely track the identity interests of the contemporary Canadian Left. After Indigenous Peoples, the next largest category is women and girls. Men and masculinity appear in only five papers, and in all cases appear to be subjects of critical rather than sympathetic analysis. Black Canadians are the third most common identity group. Then come LGBTQ subjects, the working class, immigrants generally, and people with disabilities.
The language used in paper titles also reveals the field’s embrace of specific activist vocabulary. Most common is the widespread deployment of “settler colonialism,” appearing, in various forms, approximately 22 times across session and paper titles. My guess is that many in the profession no longer consider this a politicized concept. It is simply, they would say, a useful analytical framework for making sense of the past.
But that assumption is almost certainly easier to hold in a professional community with no meaningful political diversity. When the annual meeting doesn’t feature a single paper advancing a recognizably conservative perspective, it becomes much easier to mistake your own normative concepts for neutral description. There is, quite literally, no one present to disagree—at least not openly.
There is no question that, in a better world, the CHA would take this moment to reflect on what it got right and wrong in its Canada Day Statement of five years ago. That statement asserted a scholarly consensus that did not exist, as the 60 signatories to our open letter demonstrated. More importantly, it overstated the case for certainty on a host of contested questions about what did and did not happen in Canada, and then made a normative political judgment about how those events should be interpreted.
This is not the appropriate role for a scholarly body committed to the pursuit of truth, except in cases of the most overwhelming and unambiguous evidence. Yes, the Earth is round. On genocide in Canada? That is a far more complicated question.
On my own side, our letter of protest also conceded too much. We too accepted that graves had been discovered at Kamloops. I remember working through the wording carefully and deciding against questioning that claim so soon after the announcement—it seemed too risky, too contentious. We were already challenging the main institution in our field. That was a mistake. The right formulation at the time would have been to refer to possible graves—a statement that, notably, remains accurate today.
Our decision to hedge the wording in our letter is itself instructive. As senior tenured or retired professors—people with the maximum institutional protection available in the academy—even we did not feel free to speak plainly.
Five years on, judging by what is on display at this week’s CHA meeting, very little has changed. Political homogeneity prevails. There are many good scholarly historians at work, but the only perspectives openly on display are those of the activist Left.
Christopher Dummitt is a professor of history at Trent University and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. His YouTube channel is Well, That Didn’t Suck.
