I’m not denying or minimizing these policies. But your argument relies on a survivorship bias. You think, “well, I know that potlatches and totem poles are indigenous cultural practices, and the Canadian government banned those around the turn of the 20th century, so 100% of the lost cultural practices are due to the Canadian government”. But we don’t even know the cultural practices of the majority of indigenous people who were killed by infectious disease between 1492 and maybe 1800 or so. And we barely know how the cultural practices of their survivors were fundamentally altered by those changes.

When you think about potlatches and totem poles, you should consider that these are the culture of a remnant of survivors of a vast cultural collapse that utterly eradicated entire civilizations across two continents. That doesn’t minimize their value; if anything, it makes them more rare and precious, and hence makes it even more fundamentally evil, if such a thing is possible, for the Canadian government to have attempted to destroy these things.