Residential schools

*Content warning: the following page deals with violence against Indigenous Peoples*

Residential schools were "an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Indigenous children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream white Canadian society." -Eric Hanson, Daniel P. Games, and Alexa Manuel Hanson ^[1]

The horrors of residential schools

The residential school system operated from the 1880s into the 1990s. The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and punished them for acknowledging their Indigenous heritage and culture and for speaking their own languages. Former attendees have spoken of abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological. ^[2]

Residential schools 'educated' students on prayer and manual labour in agriculture, light industry such as woodworking, and domestic work such as laundry work and sewing. The effects of residential schools continue to have a significant impact on Indigenous communities. They are considered a form of genocide due to the intentional attempt from the government and church to eradicate Indigenous cultures and lives. ^[3]

About 150,000 children were estimated to have attended. It is difficult to estimate how many children were murdered due to abuse and neglect while attending these schools. Parents were more often than not, not informed of their children's deaths. On May 27th, 2021, the first uncovering of unmarked graves was announced. Since those 215 children were returned home, over 1000 children have been uncovered. Conservative estimates suggest that over 15,000 children were killed while attending residential schools, and those that survived have faced decades of trauma. ^[4]

In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24% of previously healthy Indigenous children across so-called Canada were dying in residential schools, not including children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Moreover, anywhere from 47% (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75% (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home. ^[5]

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