10/01/2025
Top 🔟 IRS Denialist Statements 👇🏾
10. “Residential schools helped Indigenous people join modern society.”
The Truth: Indigenous Nations had thriving societies long before colonization. Residential schools attempted to erase that knowledge and replace it with dependency. True healing is reclaiming Indigenous culture, not erasing it.
9. “Indigenous peoples are just looking for compensation.”
The Truth: Survivors seek truth, recognition, and healing—not money. No amount of compensation can undo the loss of children, culture, and generations of trauma.
8. “It wasn’t genocide—it was just bad policy.”
The Truth: Policies that deliberately destroy a people’s identity, culture, and children are genocide. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself called it cultural genocide.
7. “The graves are unproven.”
The Truth: Ground-penetrating radar, survivor testimony, and historical records confirm the graves. Denial is an attempt to silence truth and dishonour those children who never made it home.
6. “That happened long ago—time to move on.”
The Truth: The last residential school closed in 1996. Survivors and their children live with the impacts today. Healing takes generations, and justice requires remembering, not forgetting.
5. “Not every child was abused.”
The Truth: Widespread systemic abuse was the rule, not the exception. Even without physical abuse, being stripped of language, family, and identity is trauma that leaves deep scars.
4. “The schools were well-intentioned for a different time.”
The Truth: Good intentions do not excuse cultural genocide. Indigenous leaders at the time resisted these schools. Governments ignored them and pursued assimilation deliberately.
3. “Most children survived, so it wasn’t that bad.”
The Truth: Thousands of children never returned home, buried in unmarked graves. Survivors endured abuse, hunger, disease, and trauma that continues to this day. Survival does not erase violence.
2. “There was no intent to kill, so it wasn’t genocide.”
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1. “Residential schools gave Indigenous kids an education.”
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