Canadian Indian residential school system

“	Underlying these arguments was the belief that the colonizers were bringing civilization to savage people who could never civilize themselves, a belief of racial and cultural superiority.	„
	~ Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

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The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools in Canada. The schools were made to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into white culture. The system has been described as an act of cultural genocide, as the system was designed to purposefully eradicate indigenous cultures, though some consider it physical genocide as well, as the residential schools lead to the deaths of at least 30,000 children. It is estimated that a total of 150,000 children were forced to attend the school system. The residential schools operated in all provinces and territories in Canada, with the exceptions of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland & Labrador.

History

In 1831, the first boarding school, known as the Mohawk Institute, was established in Brantford, Ontario for six indigenous students. In 1876, prime minister Alexander MacKenzie passed the Indian Act, a policy that was created to force First Nations people onto reserves. The Canadian government under prime minister John A. Macdonald later implemented a system of residential schools as part of an assimilation policy for indigenous peoples, which was influenced by U.S. Army general Richard Henry Pratt's ideologies to "kill the Indian and save the man".

The schools were intentionally located far off reserves in order to limit contact between the children and their parents. The schools were administered by Christian churches, with most of them being funded by the federal government.

The children were deprived of their cultures and were forced to speak English or French, while facing corporal punishment for speaking their native languages as well as being molested and sometimes killed by priests, often times having their newborn children being killed after being impregnated by their teachers. The children also faced malnutrition and died of diseases such as tuberculosis often as a result of unethical experiments projected onto them, while others committed suicide and died while trying to run away.

In 1907, chief medical officer Peter Bryce visited 35 of the schools and found that many students have died and noticed that the schools were poorly constructed with minimal care from the staff. Bryce tried to address the problems of the system to the government in an attempt to reform the system, but his advice was ignored.

There were some instances of indigenous people protesting against the residential school system, with at least 25 schools being set on fire by the students. Though most of the protests were ignored, some protests were brought to light when the federal government began to notice the ineffective failures of the system. In 1969, the schools were transferred to the Department of Indian Affairs. Over the years, more schools began to close, while others were transferred to the tribes. In 1997, the last residential school was closed in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut.

In 2008, prime minister Stephen Harper apologized for the residential school system and established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the nature of the schools under the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. In 2015, the TRC concluded that the assimilation policy towards indigenous children amounted to cultural genocide.

As of 2021, thousands of unmarked graves have been discovered near former residential schools in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.