This is all second-hand sourced because I wasn't alive during the Residential School era.

My friend's father Andy described his stay during one winter there. His parents were convinced that the school he would be attending is a typical boarding school with clean facilities and a good curriculum. They were even served a "typical lunch" that was better than what the Indians could afford at home.

When Andy got there, however, it was a different story. Pretty much everything his parents were told had been a lie. He described the food as a kind of slop you wouldn't feed to a pig. Boys and girls were raped every night by staff (though Andy claims he was lucky to avoid it, who knows). Children were made to do yard work outdoors in a Canadian winter with no protective gear of any kind. Frostbite was common, as you can imagine. He told me about one kid who lost his hand pretty much a finger at a time and was still made to go out and work. The children were beaten if they dared to speak their native language. They were beaten if they spoke out of turn. They were beaten if they "misbehaved" and they were beaten if the staff just felt like beating on them. Sicknesses that developed in the children went untreated, leading to death in many cases. Andy told me that he saw a friend of his die from pneumonia that winter and the staff just took him out back and threw him in a ditch. Stripped him first, though. The clothes went to some other boy. There's other stuff, but it gets weirdly personal and specific to Andy.

I never took residential schools that seriously until Andy told me about what it was like there. A lot of it sounded cartoonishly evil, but then I look at the world we live in and understand that a lot of the headmasters and priesthood saw the Indians as subhuman who needed to be "civilized." Dehumanization can let people do really fucked up things.

Nish are a fucked up people and I will be the first to say so, but the residential school thing... yeah, they have an honest gripe about that one.