I think that there is something profoundly wrong when people aspire to be the victim rather than their hero in their own personal narrative. It is a form of stunted emotional growth. Virtue arises from overcoming challenges, not just suffering.
Ascribing virtue to suffering itself leads to a race to the bottom, where the most noble society is that which suffers the most
Prizes and rewards are given out for being the biggest victim, so it's natural that people want to out-victim one another for additional resources. Anytime there's resources at stake, people will do what they can to gain them. In Canada it's so perverse that it seems like everyday someone is outed, after gaining a prestigious position, for not having any indigenous heritage at all. But, they used that status to rapidly gain resources over competitors.
And, in the end, the conclusion of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission was unambiguous: “Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world.”
From the 1880s through the 1990s, the Canadian government forcibly removed at least 150,000 Indigenous children from their homes and sent them t o residential schools to assimilate them. Their languages and religious and cultural practices were banned, sometimes using violence. It was, the commission reported in 2015, a system of “cultural genocide.”
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Should that not be taken at face value?
Many indigenous wanted their kids to go to these schools
There was abuse in the school system everywhere and it seems like catholic schooling has been sexually abusive everywhere
Rural canada was extremely poor
Viruses like influenza ravaged everyone
The media reporting on the matter makes it seem like everything bad of the past was exclusively done to indigenous when it was a combination of life sucking for everyone and then it being a bit worse to the indigenous on top of that. But painting it as this extreme injustice to indigenous is misleading IMO. To say nothing of the extreme grifting and people looking for payouts from the government that only make the lives of the indigenous worse.