This is the thanks we get for trying to help them.

The British Empire could have simply exterminated the lot of them. They are far more sparsely populated than in the south and pose zero threat to armies of even a few hundred troops. But instead they signed treaties, as though First Nations had any concept of land ownership.

Then Canada noticed that, when left to their own devices, they were drinking themselves to death and abusing their vulnerable, rather than do anything productive. Instead of letting them exterminate themselves, we created special schools that gave them a pathway into our successful culture.

Despite helping thousands of them to learn English and find useful work, the handful of failures made a huge stink about how the schools ruined their lives (which would have been plagued by alcohol and physical abuse without them anyway).

But the fact is, they've got nothing to complain about but a few sob stories (no doubt from the poorest performing students) and some radar readings that they don't understand. The official investigate indicates that the super-majority of deaths were from TB, the rates of which in the schools were identical to those of the surrounding reserves; they were starving to death due to mismanagement of what they were given. Almost zero First Nations students died in schools anywhere but on a reserve.

The lesson I take away from this, as a Canadian, is that we should have treated them as a hostile people the whole time.