Max Genest - May 18, 2026


What Really Happened in Residential Schools

Hosted by
Max Genest
Mentioned
John A. Macdonald Wilton Littlechild Thompson Highway Leah Meadows Len Marchand Burning Sky Skid Row
Marilyn Gladu Joins Liberals and Conservatives Should Worry More Sikh ＂Religious＂ Daggers Must Be Banned

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

147.62

Word count

623

Sentence count

42

Harmful content

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Canadian Indian Residential Schools were government-funded, mostly church-run boarding schools. Their purpose was to assimilate native children into superior European culture by giving them a Western education and practical skills. However, a quick Google search on them turns up almost nothing but horror stories. Incidentally, much of it is exaggerated or outright false.

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 The other day, I said this about residential schools.
00:00:03.100 Residential schools were based.
00:00:05.280 I like residential schools.
00:00:07.200 I'm taking this opportunity to double down.
00:00:09.880 Canada's Indian residential schools were government-funded, mostly church-run boarding schools. 0.95
00:00:14.620 Their purpose was to assimilate native children into superior European culture
00:00:19.560 by giving them a Western education and practical skills. 0.97
00:00:23.380 However, a quick Google search on them turns up almost nothing but horror stories.
00:00:28.580 Incidentally, much of it is exaggerated or outright false.
00:00:33.140 Those dramatic testimonies surged after 1996 when the last school closed and compensation programs begun.
00:00:41.400 Claims from thousands of former students were largely anonymous and unverified.
00:00:46.400 Accused staff were often dead and unable to defend themselves.
00:00:50.200 While the schools were in operation, you almost never heard of these so-called nightmares since they were widely seen as positive.
00:00:57.640 Leah Meadows, whose mother was both a student and later a teacher at Brandon Residential School, asked the obvious question.
00:01:05.140 What was the alternative? Leave kids illiterate and unable to function in the modern world?
00:01:10.620 Len Marchand, Canada's first status Indian MP, called his time at Camp Loops life-changing.
00:01:16.860 He said, by getting educated, I would be able to do something to help my people.
00:01:21.940 His son is now the Chief Justice of British Columbia.
00:01:25.400 Playwright Thompson Highway described his nine years at Guy Hill Residential School as the best
00:01:31.620 years of his life. His parents sent him voluntarily so he would not die like half his siblings from
00:01:37.960 pneumonia. There he learned piano and English, skills that made him an international success.
00:01:44.200 Wilton Littlechild, who spent 14 years as a residential school student, said he'd probably
00:01:49.960 be dead on Skid Row if they hadn't existed. Burning Sky, a very early residential school
00:01:55.760 graduate, was a good friend of our very first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, and supported
00:02:01.600 him politically. Native communities fought hard to keep many schools open. In 1930, over 100 families
00:02:08.440 at Cross Lake petitioned to rebuild theirs after a fire. In 1970, Saddle Lake parents occupied
00:02:15.120 blue quills to stop it from closing. As late as the 1920s, native bands in Alberta and the
00:02:21.500 Northwest Territories lobbied for more residential schools. By the 1940s, residential schools expanded
00:02:27.780 from prioritizing education to also acting as care homes for native children removed from abusive,
00:02:35.420 dysfunctional, or overcrowded homes for their welfare. In 1971, eight Saskatchewan bands begged
00:02:42.620 to keep their medieval residential school open for orphans and kids from broken homes.
00:02:48.640 Attending residential schools was wildly voluntary. Parents had to apply in writing for admission,
00:02:54.980 and 50% of students left after grade one at their parents' request. And yes, there was abuse,
00:03:01.620 sometimes by staff and often student on student, but it was minimal, not everywhere, and it was
00:03:07.080 on par with what occurred in white orphanages and boarding schools at the time. Also, a major
00:03:12.760 tuberculosis epidemic swept the prairies. It began on native reserves and spread into residential
00:03:18.980 schools. As a result, many children died in the schools, but even more died on the reserves.
00:03:24.960 That means residential schools actually saved lives. The claim of the 215 unmarked children's
00:03:31.440 graves at Camp Loops still has no evidence. In fact, there are far more unmarked children's
00:03:36.720 graves on reserves, and they are well-documented. While not perfect, residential schools deliver
00:03:43.240 literacy, skills, and opportunity to Native children. The good far outweighs the harms
00:03:48.760 obsessively exaggerated by the grievance industry that fabricates falsehoods to delegitimize
00:03:55.420 Canada's founding and morally blackmail us white people to extract reparations. It is a major scam
00:04:02.120 and we are falling for it by uncritically accepting the dominant narrative around 0.69
00:04:06.680 residential schools. They were a massive net positive, and I will defend them until the day
00:04:11.320 I die. Long live Canada.