Action4Canada - June 19, 2026


Chiefs Wanted Schools


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 .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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.