The Comfort of Good Intentions—and the Truth They Can’t Erase
Chris Bolster | May 20, 2025
"They didn't mean to kill them."
That’s what people say when the facts are too unbearable. When we learn that thousands of Indigenous children died in Canada’s residential schools—of tuberculosis, fire, exposure, suicide, neglect—it’s easier to envision a system that simply… failed.
It’s easier than confronting the truth: that these deaths were predictable, preventable, and rooted in a system designed to separate children from their families, erase their languages, and assimilate them by any means necessary.
It’s a comforting story, the one where no one meant for it to happen. But what if intention isn’t the point?
In 1907, Dr. Peter Bryce—Chief Medical Officer for Indian Affairs—filed a report with the federal government. He found that nearly 25 per cent of children in the residential schools he studied were already dead. Another 35 per cent had tuberculosis.
“This trail of disease and death,” he wrote, “follows the Indian child from the home to the school, from the school to the hospital, and, if not to the hospital, often to the grave.”
Bryce didn’t speak in euphemisms. He didn’t talk about good intentions. He didn’t excuse the system. He did what any decent person today would do: he investigated, reported, and demanded that Canada act.
And Canada didn’t. Duncan Campbell Scott—head of Indian Affairs and architect of residential schooling policy—suppressed Bryce’s findings. Instead of increasing funding for medical care or addressing overcrowding, Scott doubled down. He expanded the system, defended its purpose, and dismissed the death toll as the cost of “civilization.”
The historical record doesn’t just make us uncomfortable. It obliterates the idea that no one knew.
More than a century later, we still hear excuses.
Just recently, in response to a podcast episode on residential schools, someone wrote:
“The schools were designed to lift future Indigenous generations out of poverty. Mistakes were made. They were underfunded and overcrowded, but education is something the chiefs had demanded. The word ‘genocide’ does not apply (at all).”
It’s not a fringe view. It echoes across op-eds, comment threads, and political speeches. It insists on tragedy instead of responsibility. It tells us that yes, terrible things happened—but no one meant for them to. And that, somehow, absolves the entire system.
But we’ve seen the records. We’ve read the reports. We know that children were dying in staggering numbers, and that Canada knew—and chose not to act.
So when people say, “They didn’t mean to kill them,” we have to ask: What’s the difference between not meaning to—and not caring enough to stop?
One line keeps showing up in these arguments: “The chiefs wanted schools.”
And in a narrow sense, that’s true. Many Indigenous leaders did call for education. But that’s not the whole story—and it certainly doesn’t justify what actually happened.
What the chiefs asked for were local, culturally respectful, community-based schools. Schools that would support their children’s futures without tearing them from their families, languages, and Nations.
What they got instead were distant institutions built to erase. Schools that punished children for speaking their language, denied them warmth and safety, and—in thousands of cases—never sent them home again.
The turning point came when the state decided, as Duncan Campbell Scott put it, that “the Indian must be removed from the parent.” In other words, when it became clear that the wigwam outpowered the classroom, the government’s goal shifted from education to assimilation. And then to disappearance.
To invoke the chiefs’ requests today as a defence of residential schools is not only misleading—it’s manipulative. It hijacks Indigenous advocacy and uses it to excuse a system that betrayed those very requests.
But even if we accepted—for the sake of argument—that no one “meant” for children to die, it still wouldn’t change the facts.
Thousands of children did die.
Their names weren’t recorded. Their graves weren’t marked. Their families weren’t told. Their stories weren’t believed.
The system didn’t break. It worked, as it was designed to, and it left a trail of devastation that survivors, families, and communities are still navigating today.
That’s why intention isn’t the point. Because intent doesn’t undo harm. It doesn’t bring back the dead. It doesn’t answer the question:
If no one meant to kill them… why didn’t anyone stop it?
What these stories about good intentions protect isn’t the truth. It’s us. Settlers. Our comfort. Our national image. Our desire to feel like we come from a country that means well.
But if we’re brave enough to let go of that comfort, something else becomes possible. Not innocence. Not redemption.
But honesty.
And maybe, eventually, justice.
They Didn’t Mean to Kill Them.
Not because that’s true. But because that’s the story we still reach for when the real one feels too hard to bear.
But the truth is harder. And clearer. And more necessary.
They did kill them. Not all at once. Not always with intent. But through indifference, denial, underfunding, abuse, and the violent logic of assimilation.
And we still live in the country that allowed it to happen.
The question now is: Will we keep protecting our comfort, or will we finally face the cost of our systems, and whose lives were they built to discard?
Listen to the episode:
They Didn’t Mean to Kill Them