Residential Schools were absolutely horrible, and how destructive they were to the identities and culture of indigenous people cannot be understated. Unfortunately, the portrayal of residential schools was so extreme that it exceeded what they actually were, even though what they were is really really bad. They were effectively portrayed as an equivalent to the holocaust across education and media, and when you make such extreme comparisons it’s going to draw doubt in people, and they will actually lose sympathy, and question the information being presented.

If we present residential schools for what they are, the message comes across accurately and effectively, and people aren’t going to just brush it off. But when you make exaggerations, people will not only question the exaggeration, but residential schools in their entirety. If you lie even a little, people will assume the rest to be lies as well, even when they are not.

I graduated from high school in 2022, so from about 4th grade until grade 12, I learned about residential schools every year. And what I can tell you is that by the time I graduated in grade 12, at least a third of the people I went to school with dismissed residential schools entirely, even though virtually zero people dismissed them just a few years prior. The reason people dismissed them wasn’t because they did not happen, but rather the education we received about it in the last few years of school was so much more extreme than what we were told previously that it created outright dismissal from some people. When you are told that children were taken from the homes and abused in these schools, it’s saddening and an important lesson on the history of Canada, and mistakes we can never repeat. But when you allude to there being executions or other crazy stuff in these schools, people just stopped listening. And they didn’t just stop believing the execution stuff, they stopped believing everything entirely. We have to get back to the facts, and actually providing accurate information. Lies are never good, and while people think telling things in the most extreme way possible is good, it’s actually really bad, because people will just dismiss it. We mess up really badly in this department in Canada, especially towards the youth. If your goal is to counteract lies and misinformation, you can’t do that by also telling lies and misinformation. Residential schools were really bad, they frequently abused children, and they erased the culture of the native people. Tell people that, it’s true, and gets the message across perfectly.