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Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Because they didn't have schools in the middle of nowhere back when the residential school system was set up.
Often they didn't. Or they were taught by some random spinster in a barn. That's tough to pull off when nobody in a community has even a high school education.
The apparatus of the modern welfare state was not set up in Canada until the 60s. This country was a very different place before that. There was no secular public school in Quebec, for example, until 1964 - the Catholic church ran all schools. Everyone older than about 60 today in Quebec or Ireland was taught by priests and nuns.
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Sure they did. In BC a public school system was set up in 1872 and by the late 1800s a government run school could be set up anywhere where there were at least 8-10 students who'd attend. How many reserves in that province do you think couldn't have met that requirement?
And that aside, many reserves weren't anywhere you'd ever describe as the "middle of nowhere" either and yet many of their children were sent to residential schools. It wasn't a logistical necessity that children from Victoria, Vancouver, Nanaimo, Kamloops, etc. ended up in residential schools yet they did. There are countless examples of areas where there was sufficient population density to have day schools (i.e. what happened for virtually all non-aboriginal children) but the residential school model was favored. The argument that there was no reasonable alternative is simply untenable.
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Yes, it was by design. And that's the tragedy. The people who set up the system believed that children had to assimilate to have any future in Canada. They were wrong. But they were not malicious.
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There have been many evils and atrocities committed by paternalistic people who thought they were doing what's best. Colonialism and the "white man's burden" was framed in much the same way. Islamic extremists think they're doing what's best based on how they view the world, but does it really change anything or soften the blow of crimes they commit?
And even if one ignores the ugliness of forced assimilation, one cannot ignore the conditions these children were forced to live under. And this isn't just hindsight talking. PH Bryce (government Chief Medical Officer) was tasked with inspecting the conditions of the schools and he wrote a report in 1907 outlining just how terrible they were. The government ignored his report, did nothing to improve conditions, and so he eventually published his findings in 1922, calling it "The Story of a National Crime: An Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada”.