I’m frankly a little skeptical of that, if only for the reason that especially in the United States they’d already fucked these people over and dispossessed and killed so many of them quite openly, that given when the residential school system started I don’t really know that there was any actual reason to “pretend to care.” I do think they actually cared, at least speaking from what I’ve read about the U.S. Indian boarding schools. I’m unfortunately very, very ignorant of comparative Canadian history, and to a degree I’m loosely assuming some of the same forces were at play due to the two country’s similarities and the relative synchronization as to when both countries started programs like this, this “form” of Indian Education started up around the late 1870s/early 1880s in the U.S.
We were still actually outright massacring them at that point, and a huge portion of the American voting public (i.e. the only people the power brokers cared to hear opinions from at all) outright viewed Native Americans as little more than demons and monsters, deserving of anything and everything that could be brought to bear against them. If anything some of these programs actually are more liberal than what the extremely racist anti-Indian populist sentiment was among the population at large.
That being said you don’t get a participation trophy for having good intentions but doing a really bad thing. I just think that there’s an actual historical value in recognizing the effects of toxic paternalism, which is obscured in my opinion if we don’t look to the real motivations of the people involved. Richard Pratt who is massively famous in this area (he ran the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania), is known in modern times for the infamous (now) quote of “Kill the Indian, save the man.” But Pratt was also much more progressive than most Americans of his day, he was vehemently opposed to racial segregation for example, and in most respects was seen as an advocate for the Indians during his lifetime.
This isn’t necessarily an impossible thing to reconcile. Lots of antislavery activists before the Civil War were inveterate racists and white supremacists, a lot of modern people struggle to understand this, but there’s actually a whole body of thought on it that has “logical consistency” within the thinking of the time. Some of this gets difficult because of the tendency to focus only on condemnation. White supremacism is always bad, for example, so the simplistic view of completely defining a historical figure based on their worst aspect, creates “difficulties” in reconciling famous abolitionists who were likewise white supremacists of the worst kind. If you don’t at all attempt to understand the entirely different cultural and rhetorical context, it becomes, in my opinion, all but impossible to have a real understanding of these periods of history.