No indigenous child was ever ‘forced' to go to school

Brian Giesbrecht, a retired Manitoba provincial judge and a Frontier Centre for Public Policy senior fellow, debunks the myth that Canada’s indigenous children were forced to attend Indian Residential Schools against the will of their parents in the critically informative opinion piece on the other side of the paywall.

Giesbrecht could have well added that as the decades passed, and especially after 1940, a greater and greater proportion of Indian Residential School children entered their boarding schools emotionally damaged by life in poverty stricken, dysfunctional, neglectful, and/or abusive reserve households.

When these students testified, without cross examination or witness collaboration, before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about the abuse they allegedly experienced in these schools, many if not most were likely psychologically transferring their damaging home experience to benevolent institutions meant to rescue them from what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) famously called a life that would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” a life that too many indigenous children still face today decades after the last of these schools was closed.