Having already debunked Senator Lynn Beyak’s nonsense about residential schools last year (‘Beyak wrong on residential schools', St. Albert Gazette, February 17, 2018), I wasn’t expecting to have to do it again in response to Ken Allred’s latest column (‘Political Correctness’, May 22, 2019), but apparently I do.
As I pointed out last time, the Truth and Reconciliation’s summary report, Honouring The Truth, Reconciling For The Future, did in fact acknowledge the positive memories some students had of residential schools, including the positive motivations and impressive skills of some of the teachers, and the valuable role physical education played. That alone shows Beyak either didn’t read the report, or she is a liar.
She is also the one presenting a distorted image of the residential schools, not the TRC. The few positive memories students had are vastly outnumbered by the memories of misery and suffering. They are directly responsible for a lot of the social dysfunction in Indigenous families today. While Mr. Allred notes that 35% of the letters Beyak received about residential schools were positive, that means that a clear 65% majority of respondents pointed out how bad the schools were.
Even if you don’t believe all the people who testified to the TRC, what about the government and school bureaucrats who wrote in their own correspondence about the underfunding of the schools and the decrepit conditions many students were expected to live in. The TRC quotes as much from government and church archives as it does from students.
What possible reason could they have to lie about these problems?
Aside from that, I still can’t understand why a supposed conservative like Beyak would have to say anything positive about the schools. They involved massive amounts of government coercion and control of peoples’ private lives, the exact things that conservatism is supposed to hate. Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their parents, and school administrators tried to force them to stay even when they were old enough to leave, or even to control who they married. Indigenous families were denied the schooling choices non-Native families received.
These are the sorts of things that would cause riots in the streets if they were done to non-Native families, so why were they acceptable to Indigenous ones?
The criticism of Beyak is not motivated by her failure to be politically correct.
It’s about her failure to even have the most basic facts straight.
Jared Milne, St. Albert
