A few last thoughts for now on @erinotoole's pandering to residential school apologists. He, like Lynn Beyak and Frances Widdowson, work with a number of failed and false assumptions easily and repeatedly debunked, with "good intentions" only one of many. (CW: colonial trauma)

An important if overlooked aspect of the "good intentions" rhetoric is that benevolent whites were trying to "help" impoverished and dispossessed Indigenous people. Even if--a big if--we take that claim at face value, we have to ask: *why* were they dispossessed? Ah, well...

Residential school apologists point to Indigenous poverty, homelessness, and social traumas as reasons for the "schools," that the "education" was for economic and social stability (but notably not upward mobility). Yet they imagine that those traumas appeared out of thin air.

They presume poverty and then conflate it with abuse and neglect, as if these are synonymous. And they scrupulously avoid the constant resistance to the schools from both children and families. If home life was so bad, why did so many children die trying to get back?

Even so, Indigenous communities had been ground down by the effects of Canadian "Indian" policies for generations before residential schools were founded; still resilient, but increasingly circumscribed physically, territorially, economically, politically. But still resistant.

Canadian bureaucrats devised another way to bring Indigenous nations to heel: if adults couldn't be managed, their children would be--and the adults would follow. Education policy joined agriculture, transportation, trade, missionization, and military threat to compel obedience.

These were all done with purported "good intentions"--good intentions for the state and its agents, largely. We have to interrogate that concept anytime a policy has to be followed up with threats of violence in order to ensure its implementation.

Just as Stephen Harper's residential school apology explicitly and intentionally isolated schools from larger processes of colonialism, so too do apologists like these. Their gospel of good intentions and uplift depends entirely on a presumption of innate Indigenous inferiority.

Their baseline assumption is that Indigenous families were *inherently* dysfunctional, impoverished, and ignorant, and that the schools were a charitable act from a beneficent nation rather than an intentional extension of Indigenous disempowerment and dispossession policies.

The solution was never, “How do we help communities heal from the harms of policies we inflicted on them?” because..."good intentions." So instead it became “How else can we punish communities for the traumas we inflicted, while blaming them for the effects of our own policies?”

But genuine benevolence doesn't require RCMP assistance to round up "pupils"; it doesn't require threats to starve and imprison parents if they don't surrender their children to the state; it doesn't necessitate a curriculum of cultural shame, physical violence, and worse.

"Good intentions" within a system designed *specifically* to destroy Indigenous cultures, economic self-sustainability, and territorial sovereignty *over decades* while explicitly reinforcing ideas of white European superiority and Canadian supremacy simply aren't creditable.

No matter how "good" some teachers' intentions might have been, they were nevertheless active agents of a violent system, enactors of white supremacist policies, and empowered by Church and State to separate families, impose corporal punishment on vulnerable children.

Does this mean all teachers were intentionally abusive? No. Some were themselves traumatized by what they witnessed and worked to offer some small measure of kindness to lonely and suffering children far from family. But this minority didn't/couldn't make these places humane.

I’m sure there are ICE agents who feel really badly about separating toddlers from their parents at the US border and putting them into cages, who smile and offer comfort as they close the doors and go back home to their own children, the screams of babies ringing in their ears.

That they feel badly doesn't matter. Not one bit. Not while those terrified children sit in cages, with more every day. Their “good intentions” are irrelevant. Their bad actions and their propping up of an abusive process are what’s relevant.

Did all students have universally horrible experiences? No. The TRC Report also includes testimony from students who spoke of some good experiences, but that hardly erases the overwhelming testimony of pain, loneliness, and shame. Children survived as best they could.

There's a lot of nuance in the TRC report and the many books and articles written about the residential school system--if people are willing to do the reading. Sadly, apologists never are. Instead, they use "good intentions" like some sort of redemptive token removed from truth.

But silver linings and good intentions can't possibly justify the destruction wrought and its continuing legacies. Nor can they redeem a system and its agents invested in the destruction of children, families, cultures.

Survivors and their families have pushed against denialism for generations, and the TRC is the result of their activism, not government largesse. And survivors and their families are the ones constantly minimized when this history is trivialized, mocked, or diminished.

My family didn’t experience residential/boarding school. But many of my students, colleagues, and friends have experienced the multigenerational impacts of those schools; its legacies are a constant shadow in my classes; we all continue to grapple with its realities.

Why don’t we champion “good intentions” of Indigenous people when provinces are throwing peaceful land rights protesters in jail? When Indigenous mothers protest the continuing theft of children by the state? When trans and two-spirit Indigenous folks are vilified for existing?

Why is it always “good intentions” of empowered white people propping up verifiably violent systems and practices that we’re expected to sympathize with and not the Indigenous, Black, disabled, and dispossessed people whose lives they’re constantly trying to dominate and ruin?

And for anyone to treat the experiences of residential school survivors as some sort of rhetorical or political “gotcha” by fundamentally misrepresenting their purpose, function, and impacts is beneath contempt and deserves every possible condemnation it receives. #ResignOToole