Action4Canada - June 19, 2026


Chiefs Wanted Schools

Hosted by
Tanya Gaw
Mentioned
Don Smith
Michelle Stirling - Criminalizing Denialism： Burying the Facts June 17, 2026 Pastors Webinar Bill C-9 and Coronation Oath

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

151.42

Word count

374

Sentence count

29

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

The Indian Residential School system was a systematic effort by the Canadian government over decades to snatch Indigenous children from their homes and families, eradicate their culture and heritage, and remove them from the modern world. Education was a treaty obligation, which was fulfilled when chiefs and councils requested a school.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 And Globe and Mail, what's this, P.S.?
00:00:02.380 While apologizing, the Globe and Mail dumps more fuel on the fire,
00:00:06.720 saying many students were physically abused or sexually abused,
00:00:10.660 and all were the target of systematic effort by the Canadian government over decades
00:00:15.000 to snatch them from their homes and families, eradicate their culture and heritage.
00:00:19.460 That, too, is reality, a damning reality.
00:00:24.420 It's not.
00:00:25.560 Some students were abused.
00:00:27.080 there were 31 convictions listed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports
00:00:33.040 over 139 schools in 133 years. We all wish that number was zero, but that's a very low ratio.
00:00:42.600 Most students were voluntarily enrolled by their own parents who wanted them to have useful
00:00:47.000 education for the modern world. Some parents wanted the free daycare. Some parents had
00:00:52.360 remarried, and sadly, the new partner did not want the other's kids. And many families were huge by
00:00:58.240 today's standards, and even the standards then. Families with 10, 12, 14 children could not feed
00:01:05.120 and care for them all, so many of the kids were sent to Indian Residential School to survive. 0.84
00:01:10.960 The kids may not have liked it, or understood that their parents were all part of the scheme.
00:01:16.480 But how is this different from today's parent taking a child to their first day of school,
00:01:21.780 distracting them with a toy, and then running away.
00:01:25.880 And education was a treaty obligation,
00:01:29.660 which was fulfilled when chiefs and councils requested a school.
00:01:33.700 The Indian residential school system was agreed to by Indian chiefs.
00:01:39.280 Schools were requested by chiefs and council.
00:01:42.020 Education was part of treaty obligations, not for snatching.
00:01:45.700 The IRS system was set up with prior review and approval by numerous Indian chiefs, as told in historian Don Smith's article, The Chief's Journey.
00:01:57.080 So they went, a handful of chiefs went down east.
00:02:00.500 They saw the Mohawk Institute.
00:02:02.680 They had students give presentations.
00:02:04.980 They saw what they were teaching and learning.
00:02:06.940 They saw how society was developing.
00:02:09.160 They approved.
00:02:10.820 And there were some children who were snatched.
00:02:13.700 but they were snatched from the jaws of destitution, neglect, and hunger. Today,
00:02:18.780 we call it being apprehended, a child taken into custody because the risks in the home
00:02:24.280 outweighed the ensuing challenges of separation from parents.