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

Adrienne Maree Brown ^[2]	"I tend to think of abolition as one result of transformative justice: abolition is the end of prisons; transformative justice is the methods people use to uproot injustice patterns in communities. I tend to think of abolition as a totality, and I think that can be tricky. People set out to abolish slavery and we ended up with the prison industrial complex because while there were surface and policy level shifts, the culture did not shift. That deep underlying racism and classism remains and is now roaring to the surface as we write this. So, while I identify as an abolitionist, I find speaking about the iterative tangible work of transformative justice makes more sense to me now–I don’t simply want the prisons gone, I want a radically different way of interacting with each other to grow."
Mia Mingus ^[3]	"I understand abolition to be a necessary part of transformative justice because prisons, and the PIC, are major sites of individual and collective violence, abuse, and trauma. However, transformative justice is and must also be a critical part of abolition work because we will need to build alternatives to how we respond to harm, violence, and abuse. Just because we shut down prisons, does not mean that these will stop. Transformative justice has roots in abolition work and is an abolitionist framework, but goes beyond abolishing prisons (and slavery) and asks us to end–and transform the conditions that perpetuate–generational cycles of violence such as rape, sexual assault, child abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, intimate partner abuse, war, genocide, poverty, human trafficking, police brutality, murder, stalking, sexual harassment, all systems of oppression, dangerous societal norms, and trauma."
Amanda Aguilar Shank ^[4]	Interpersonal harm is inevitable. Abolition imagines that "each moment where harm happens is an opportunity to transform relationships and communities, build trust and safety, and grow slowly toward the beautiful people we are meant to be, in the world we deserve."

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. ^[5]

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. ^[6]

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. ^[7]

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. ^[8]

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