Max Genest - May 18, 2026


What Really Happened in Residential Schools


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

147.61867

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 .

Transcript

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