This is one incident among many, but it has less to do with indigenous children as it does with any system wherein the accounting of "disconnected" children is left to that system. Tuam, County Galway ... eight hundred infants with missing graves. St Mary's Cemetery in Lanark, four hundred left in a single mass grave. In Germany, nuns pimping out orphans. The Sisters of Mercy scandal. I could go on. Bluntly put, when…
These children weren’t abandoned, they were forcefully taken from their families by the government. They were sent vast distances to these boarding schools to “kill the Indian in the child”, where they were often mistreated, sexually abused, and went missing ( murder/neglect/ abuse). So it is all the more egregious in this case. The government turned a blind eye to the Churches, and the Churches were doing God’s work…
Most native tribes, especially in the West, were not crushed militarily, as they were in the U.S.. The crown and most tribes signed treaties. While what was going on South of the border was, no doubt, instructive, it's to both sides' credit that they looked for a peaceful way to coexist. The terms of those treaties remain controversial today but, nonetheless, they put Canada's natives on fundamentally different footing than almost any other overrun hunter-gatherer societies in human history. They had an established, legal right to continue existing.
It's incredibly difficult for us, today, to understand the state of affairs that existed just after these treaties were signed. Native tribes were not peacefully co-existing, stagnant populations that had existed in the same spot for thousands of years. They moved around, bumped into each other, struggled to defend territories, had wars, raided each other. Raiding was so honoured and economically important in some tribe's cultures that even other native tribes did not want to be their neighbours. A big part of why so many tribes were eager to sign treaties with the Crown was that the Crown was promising security. They wouldn't have to continually fight other tribes to keep their sources of food secure. The Crown proved to be a less than completely secure food source themselves at first, but that's another discussion.
When we, today, talk about the desire of leaders such as John A Macdonald to "kill the Indian in the child", we find this atrocious. We respect diversity of religion and culture. However, at the time of John A Macdonald, native culture presented real problems. It was actually progressive for the time to think that natives could be as productive as any other Canadian citizens if they could be educated to adopt European economic pursuits and abandon cultural practices, such as raiding, that were wholly incompatible with the peace and order the Crown promised its citizens, native and European alike. There were those, at the time, who still espoused outright genocide. There remain, even today, places in the world where outright genocide is pursued actively.
The residential schools are a painful part of history that is still, very much, in raw living memory. However, we must look at the big picture too. In almost any other place and time in history, native cultures would already be utterly extirpated. They still exist and thrive in Canada and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to do so. How many other times in history have cultures so alien to each other managed to coexist? There remain many problems to tackle, but hope for the future is well justified based on Canada's past.