"but I've never heard anyone deny the existence of residential schools"

Sorry I should have made things clearer. My sister and a friend were having coffee at a cafe in Victoria, BC., Canada, and they were discussing the residential schools, someone, rudely, turned from another table and said that the whole compensation programme, for ex-residents, was a bagful of lies, because the whole resdential school issue was lies to begin with. This attitude is not wide spread nor is there anything printed, but, apparently, it's out there.