Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief

So, Conservative senator, Lynn Beyak, is now being vilified for saying out loud that residential schools may have actually done some good for some students.  Hell, vilified?  If the elites could string her up on the nearest tree, or horse whip her, they would in a heart beat.

Frankly I agree with her.  There is no way every minute of every day was torture and hell for every student.  The organizations that ran these schools did so with the best of intentions.  The fact that bad things happened at times is just real life in any boarding school. 

What about Britain, where upper-class parents are not trusted to raise their own children in the "British" way?  Does no one think children were abused at these schools?  Of course they were.  And even public day schools, such as the ones I attended, were rife with the strap, administered by the principal, and regular beatings in the school yard for anyone and everyone.  Did teachers or parents do anything to object?  No.  That's just the way it was.

My question is, what would have happened had native children been left to grow up on the reserve?  For one thing, they would have had no written language (because natives did not develop writing) and would have remained as isolated in poverty and misery as those living on these desolate and miserable reserves remain today.  I have a status, off-reserve friend and he bemoans the fact that natives did not integrate into mainstream Canadian society.  "Why oh why didn't we all get off the reserve?" he laments.  Why?  Because the Indian Act and Reserve system are the mechanisms by which the money flows to native leaders. 

That's why.

Senator Murray Sinclair, himself a native, compared the senator who spoke up to the Holocaust and Hitler's atrocities.  Really?  Sinclair is the same guy who headed up the travelling six-year "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" -- the one that cost taxpayers $60 billion and paid natives $4.172 billion. 

I'll say this about that commission:  It might have been about "reconciliation", but it certainly wasn't about "truth".  Truth is objective.  Listening to hundreds of subjective accounts of school "survivors" does not mean anyone got anywhere near the truth. 

Thanks in part to residential schools, we now have many Indian doctors, lawyers and other professionals.  The ones suffering are those living in squalor under Indian chiefs on God forsaken reserves.  It's tragic.