In that New York Times article I quoted about how the U. of Saskatchewan is going to de-emphasize white “linear thinking” in favor of circular reasoning as exemplified by “wampum belt, dances and oral storytelling,” the explanation given for all the problems of Amerindians in Canada was:

While sporadic efforts on many campuses took root decades ago, a true campaign was set off by the Canadian commission that looked into residential schools and their abuses against indigenous children. … Those ills, the commission found, can often be traced to the residential schools, where the government used education as a weapon of assimilation for over a century by pulling more than 150,000 aboriginal children away from their families and cultures and educating them to be Western workers.

Residential schools were set up by white progressive do-gooders to help aborigines in Canada , America, and Australia. Although Obama’s America was bored with the travails of American Indians, Canada and Australia are currently obsessed with the horrors presumably perpetuated across space and and time by boarding schools.

For example, Philip Noyce directed a movie, “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” about the horrors of 1920s boarding schools for Aboriginal Australians. (Ironically, when Noyce discovered how horrible his adolescent star’s home life was with her drunken mother, he paid to send her to a boarding school.)

On the other hand, I’ve never seen any sort of quantitative study of aboriginals and their descendants who were sent to boarding schools versus those who were not. But who needs data when we just plain know that white people’s attempts to help are the root of all evil? From the National Post of Toronto: