Truth and Reconciliation??? What a load of bollocks. Providing kids an education while the rest of the world were forced into coal mines and child labor.
It’s all a big stich up by the outrage mob. Trying to pin something from the past on you to make you feel guilty about it. Soon you’ll be made to feel guilty about raising a Canadian flag.
I can’t believe people fall for this shit. No wonder pyramid schemes work. Ffs. Lol.
I admit, I kind of wondered about that myself.
Residential schools were just boarding schools. There was no way the government could have built local schools in all those remote communities way back when. So they built central schools all over the map and sent the kids to the schools.
And why did they do that?
Well my guess is that that most if not all of the people in the native communities were unable to read and write. In any language. So the government figured they'd try and correct that and build schools and teach the kids to read and write and do math and whatever else. The natives today never stop talking about "our traditional ways and means" and it all being taken away from them. Well, bad news, there's no fucking future in being an illiterate beaver pelt hunter in 2021. You need an education and I don't consider learning how to fish and hunt and pick berries much of an education. Nothing that can't be learned in 15 minutes.
Were residential schools perfect? No fucking way. But at the same time, I don't think that the nuns took the kids out back and shot them either. And as you say, they didn't put them to work in the mines, though a lot of them probably ended up there anyway, but not when they were 10. I refuse to believe that absolutely everyone connected to residential schools were sadists and evil. I'm sure there was some, even a good number that were sadists, but was that any different than any other school at the time? Hell, I remember "the strap" when I was a kid at school. I never got it. I didn't know anyone who did in fact, but we heard about it all the time. I remember one kid in my grade 6 class got sent "to the office" for some fucked up behavior or another and we all wondered if he was going to "get the strap" He came back and said that no, he didn't get the strap but that the principal pulled it out of his desk drawer and slammed it down on the desk and threatened him with it. I have no idea if it any of it was true. Who knows.
I remember back 25 years or more ago when I first began hearing about residential schools there were 2 sides to the story. There were lots of native people who went to residential schools and liked it. But their voices have been long since drowned out and now it's nothing but the darkness and the evil of the place.
What was the government of the day supposed to do? Not provide an education for the native kids? Let the cycle of complete illiteracy just keep on going? Can you imagine the outrage that that would cause today?