The travesty of paying indigenous people to go to school

Brian Giesbrecht, a retired Manitoba Provincial Court Judge, social commentator, and prolific editorial writer carefully addresses the troubling mission creep when it comes to the indigenous people of Canada in the opinion piece below.

What started as a report about and compensation for largely voluntary attendance at Indian Residential Schools (IRSs) by “treaty Indians” soon provoked similar demands by former Métis students who weren’t even supposed to attend IRSs but whose parents begged for their children’s enrolment anyway. This has now been followed by compensation to indigneous children who attended on-reserve day schools who returned to their parents home every night.

Though Giesbrecht does not mention it, “indigenous logic” and “knowings” — forms of understanding that now take precedence over Western scientific ways of judging reality — says that the next moccasin to fall will surely be compensation for cultural loss among indigenous children who attended ordinary ethnically-mixed public schools in rural and urban areas of Canada.

The following opinion piece was first published by a prominent media house on January 28, 2023 and is reposted below with his kind consent.