Odds are that you haven't even heard of the Canadian Residential School System before. But upon hearing some bad stuff about it your first impression is, I'm not yet ready to say categorically that this whole thing is bogus. But let's have some healthy skepticism here...

And you think that anyone else should care about your uniformed opinion?

Before dismissing the overall story I strongly recommend verifying that they existed, natives were forced to go and live in these schools (hence residential) by law, there was widespread physical and sexual abuse, the Canadian government has admitted that they constituted genocide, and literally thousands of people have filed private lawsuits over what happened there. There are literally so many cases that there is a department of the Federal government dedicated to helping sort them out, and there are questions about whether the Anglican Church should be allowed to go bankrupt from liability over claims.

About individual claims, that is a question. I have personal reasons for suspecting that high levels of death were not accidental. But the levels of drug abuse are high, and I do not have to look far to find people I have known who have eg heroin addictions. With addicts it is sadly sometimes hard to tell what is true and what was made up. (It is hard to tell if they know the difference in fact.) So there are definitely going to be people who "remember" things that didn't happen.

But that doesn't stop the actual facts from being shocking enough without adornment.

Cheers,
Ben

I likewise already had independent confirmation of more than enough of it. :-(

Cheers,
Ben

That is why the mention of heroin. There is a particular person that I am thinking of here who was a junkie and has a lot of very dubious stories. In general it isn't hard to find natives telling wild stories, and the wildest are easy to dismiss.

As for TB, it is a matter of public record that in the early 1900's fully a quarter of the kids sent to the residential schools died of TB. And nobody really cared. It is also a matter of public record that not many years earlier natives were being given unwashed blankets from public hospitals in hopes of making them sick. Certainly attitudes hadn't changed much, so it would not be surprising if this was due to intentional policy. But so far as I know no "smoking gun" has emerged. (Nor is the government very interested in assisting any investigations that might turn one up. Their only real defence against the thousands of lawsuits that they face is plausible deniability. If clear written evidence shows up of the gentleman's agreements, the liability lid could shoot sky-high.)

Remember that the government department administrating this had the intentional goal to take care of the "Indian Problem" by getting rid of it. In all official statements on the topic the way to get rid of it was "assimilation". OTOH the evidence that I have seen suggests that all of the people who were busily talking about that also firmly believed that Indians were an inferior people, and I find it hard to square that with integrating them into white society on equal terms.

Also this should be put into context with a whole series of government policies aimed at making Canada safe for whites. In particular the history of the Department of Control of the Chinese makes for sad reading. I kid you not. That was a cabinet level post for decades. Its purpose was to get the Chinese return to China without having to tell them to do so in so many words...

Regards,
Ben