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

28

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 And Globe and Mail, what's this, P.S.?
00:00:02 While apologizing, the Globe and Mail dumps more fuel on the fire,
00:00:06 saying many students were physically abused or sexually abused,
00:00:10 and all were the target of systematic effort by the Canadian government over decades
00:00:15 to snatch them from their homes and families, eradicate their culture and heritage.
00:00:19 That, too, is reality, a damning reality.
00:00:24 It's not.
00:00:25 Some students were abused.
00:00:27 there were 31 convictions listed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports
00:00:33 over 139 schools in 133 years. We all wish that number was zero, but that's a very low ratio.
00:00:42 Most students were voluntarily enrolled by their own parents who wanted them to have useful
00:00:47 education for the modern world. Some parents wanted the free daycare. Some parents had
00:00:52 remarried, and sadly, the new partner did not want the other's kids. And many families were huge by
00:00:58 today's standards, and even the standards then. Families with 10, 12, 14 children could not feed
00:01:05 and care for them all, so many of the kids were sent to Indian Residential School to survive. 0.84
00:01:10 The kids may not have liked it, or understood that their parents were all part of the scheme.
00:01:16 But how is this different from today's parent taking a child to their first day of school,
00:01:21 distracting them with a toy, and then running away.
00:01:25 And education was a treaty obligation,
00:01:29 which was fulfilled when chiefs and councils requested a school.
00:01:33 The Indian residential school system was agreed to by Indian chiefs.
00:01:39 Schools were requested by chiefs and council.
00:01:42 Education was part of treaty obligations, not for snatching.
00:01:45 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 So they went, a handful of chiefs went down east.
00:02:00 They saw the Mohawk Institute.
00:02:02 They had students give presentations.
00:02:04 They saw what they were teaching and learning.
00:02:06 They saw how society was developing.
00:02:09 They approved.
00:02:10 And there were some children who were snatched.
00:02:13 but they were snatched from the jaws of destitution, neglect, and hunger. Today,
00:02:18 we call it being apprehended, a child taken into custody because the risks in the home
00:02:24 outweighed the ensuing challenges of separation from parents.