Did some more searching and found some counter-narratives:

• https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/history/the-other-side-of-the-residential-school-question.html

It should be remembered that in many cases the schools were a response, however inadequate and, admittedly, in some cases abusive, to the serious social problems of alcoholism, violence, and a welfare mentality that were already destroying native people.

Despite the warnings of historians against romanticising pre-contact native cultures, the political and financial stakes are high and the idealizing of the native past continues unabated, ignoring as it does anything which might contradict the ideal. The violence and cruelty noted by early ethnographers in their reports of native slavery practices and inter-tribal warfare, and the many inequalities which existed in the caste-like social structures of many native cultures, are now cut out of the history. They simply don't fit.

A number have even told me that their time at the residential school was the happiest of their lives.

Painting all residential schools, and by implication all who ran them, with the same brush as those schools where abuse occurred, neither serves the truth nor does justice to the memory of the many and there were many who served the native people in good faith and with much love.

• https://www.eurocanadian.ca/2015/06/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-residential-schools-and-promotion-of-white-guilt-in-canada.html

The purpose of the schools was to help children, not only to take them away from potentially abusive situations, but to prepare them for life in the ever changing modern world. This did mean, however, that such education would be Western

as shameful as the government's actions have been in the past towards aboriginals, they were never about eradicating them.

Judge Murray Sinclair, who is a leading member of Truth and Reconciliation commission, stated that he believes it should be a crime to say anything positive about the residential schools or to deny that they weren't as terrible and evil as the media is promoting. He liked it to holocaust denial