Having spent five of my younger years at a residential institution for boys, I have some understanding of the potential horrors of life for those of Canada's indigenous children sent to residential government schools. But it should be remembered that, as in my own case, those children were separated from their families and consigned to the care of strangers with good intentions. The objective in the case of indigenous children being to remove them from the tribal world of a hunter-gathering people and equip them for survival and potential success in the vastly more diverse world of the Canadian national community. This meant teaching them either the French or English language, plus the three R's, something deemed possible only through a residential school training. And for many indigenous children attending a residential school, such training was indeed achieved.
The moral validity of transitioning indigenous peoples from their ancestral culture to that of the settler Canadian nation is a matter of debate. However, the decision having been made to bring about such a transition, the residential school policy was the only means conceived of to achieve it. The downside to this decision is the fact that children are always at greater risk of abuse by strangers than by their own kin. And thus it was that children removed, sometimes forcibly, from their native home to a residential school were the victims of deviant members of residential school staff. Tales of such abuse have naturally been told by former residential school students, as well as by others without personal experience but who claim to have investigated the matter. Such tales are in many and perhaps the great majority of cases surely based in reality. Some stories, however, and these not necesssarily based on any claim to personal experience, are horrific. Of these, some making claims of mass murder, are so horrific as to prompt government inquiry. The results of this inquiry, which involved radar inspection of alleged mass burial sites are now in. What they show is that claims of mass murder at the Indian Residential Schools are almost certainly entirely false.
The Canadian government has halted an inquiry into claims of mass burials of children at former Church-run residential schools – after not one grave was discovered.
Claims of the abuse and murders of hundreds indigenous children have triggered arson attacks, vandalism and the desecration of about 120 churches across Canada amid an outpouring of national grief.
The Canadian government set up the National Advisory Committee on Residential Schools, Missing Children and Unmarked Burials to investigate the claims and the full extent of the alleged abuse and murder of Indian children by Christians of European extraction.
But after three years of searching for bodies, at the cost of $216.5 million, not a single set of human remains has been found.
