God I hate these disingenuous comments on residential schools. They are an annoying kind of technically correct. Acting like they were an internment camp trying to harm the natives is just blatantly dishonest. You have to take the good when you're going to rattle off the bad.

After the 1940s the government was going to end them, natives wanted them kept open. From then on they were made non mandatory because the government still wanted to cut the cost of it if they have to keep it. It then ended up becoming a defacto child services home. They put kids removed from bad homes in residential schools since it's not easy to find actual homes for them. An uncomfortable, underfunded, and sub-par school is still a vastly superior place for the kids than homes where their parents beat them and give them nearly no education.