How the Aboriginal Industry turned schools into a cash cow

Please find below another outstanding opinion piece from James Pew, a prolific and thoughtful writer and businessman.

The theme of the essay is best expressed in its last sentence:

Will Canadians ever learn what really happened at Indian Residential Schools? Until a politician possesses the courage to challenge the Aboriginal Industry, and the propagating of false claims ceases to be so lucrative, Canadians can expect greater levels of sensational and fallacious narrative weaving around the history of indigenous relations.

More particular, this intelligent piece of provocative writing clearly documents how the Indian Industry, the older name for the Aboriginal Industry, has deviously distorted indigenous history (and, by implication, prehistory) to portray post-contact interaction with Europeans, especially British ones, as having been a deliberate effort to obliterate Canada’s aboriginal peoples from the face of the earth.

Nothing could be further from truth as Pew shows in his careful summary of the motives, content, and results of this interaction.

My contention is that without denying that what became Canada is a conquered territory and its original human inhabitants colonized peoples, the country’s treatment of our aboriginals has been the most benign and altruistic in the entire 500-plus years of the global interaction of the West with the Rest, the Indian Residential Schools, despite their shortcomings, being the best example of this.

More particularly, treaties need not have been offered to the indigenous people of Canada, just as they were never offered to most other conquered people around the world for millennia, including those conquered by aboriginal peoples themselves for thousands of years before any contact with Europeans.

James Pew is also the editor/author of two Substack newsletters, containing both his writing and the work of many other gifted thinkers, deserving your close attention: