Inconclusive Finding

The second movie that I saw was The Experimental Eskimos. The 3 points of this documentary was that:

1. The Canadian goverment in the 60s ran a social experiment to see if Inuits can be fully assimilated into 'white' culture by sending 3 Inuit boys for schooling in Ottawa.
2. The experiment was a failure in that the boys were not assimilated. Moreover, the skills they acquired enabled them to become leaders fighting for Aboriginal rights.
3. But the personal cost to them eventually led to the un-ravelling of their professional and personal lives.

Though I have sympathies for the 3 men in this movie, Peter Ittinuar, Zebedee Nungak, and Eric Tagoona, I did not agree whole-hearted with this film's conclusions:

1. There was no corroborating evidence of this social 'experiment', as the narrator kept intoning in a ominous manner, outside of a few memos. Ignoring the racist and colonialist language of the time, it did not sound like official government policy. The 3 boys seemed to have been caught in some bureaucratic project, but the attempt to conflate their experience with the residential school scandal is misleading.
2. I agree that their education, though forced upon them, was better than anything they would have received up North. This enabled them to use it to fight for Native rights.
3. But the cost during their teenage years (e.g., estrangement from their family and culture, exposure to racist statements) was a necessary but not sufficient reason for their 'downfall'. The men admitted that there were other reasons for their professional failures as well as personal problems. That is, if everything had continued successfully for them, this experience would not have really affected their lives. Conversely, it may have been the final straw, but there were other reasons that culminated in their recent personal crises.