Canadian Indian residential school system

Based on Wikipedia: Canadian Indian residential school system

For more than a century, the Canadian government ran a network of boarding schools with a stated purpose that sounds almost unimaginable today: to "kill the Indian in the child." That phrase, used by historians to describe the system's actual goal, captures something that official documents tried to obscure with bureaucratic language about "civilization" and "assimilation." Between the 1880s and 1997, approximately 150,000 Indigenous children passed through these institutions. More than 6,000 of them never came home.

This is the story of the Canadian Indian residential school system—how it began, what happened inside its walls, and why its consequences echo through Indigenous communities to this day.

The Logic of Cultural Destruction

To understand the residential schools, you first have to understand what the colonizers believed they were doing. They weren't operating in secret, ashamed of their actions. They believed they were helping.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which spent years investigating the system, identified the core assumption: "Underlying these arguments was the belief that the colonizers were bringing civilization to savage people who could never civilize themselves." This wasn't a fringe view. It was official policy, supported by church and state alike, grounded in a conviction of racial and cultural superiority that Europeans and their descendants held with complete sincerity.

The method chosen to achieve this "civilization" was deliberate separation. Take the children. Remove them from their families, their communities, their languages, their ceremonies, their ways of understanding the world. Place them in institutions where everything familiar would be forbidden. Replace their identity with something new.

The theory was that you couldn't change adults—they were too set in their ways. But children were malleable. If you caught them young enough and kept them long enough, you could produce a new generation that would fit seamlessly into European-Canadian society. Their Indigeneity would simply disappear.

Early Experiments in Erasure

The impulse to "educate" Indigenous children began long before Canada existed as a nation. French missionaries arriving in New France during the 1600s attempted to establish schools, including day schools and boarding facilities run by religious orders like the Jesuits and Ursulines. These early efforts largely failed. Indigenous communities, understandably, were reluctant to hand over their children for extended periods to foreigners with strange customs and stranger beliefs.

By the 1690s, most of these programs had been abandoned. The reasons were practical as much as philosophical. Colonial life was unstable. Resources were limited. And here's an interesting twist: the colonists actually needed Indigenous peoples. The fur trade depended on their knowledge and participation. Military conflicts required their alliance. Good relations meant survival.

This dynamic shifted after the War of 1812. With the threat of American invasion diminished, Indigenous peoples transformed in colonial eyes from necessary allies to inconvenient obstacles. The officials who once dealt with Indigenous communities—military men who had learned their customs and often respected them—were replaced by civilian administrators focused solely on permanent settlement. Land was the priority now, and Indigenous peoples were in the way.

Building the System

Religious missionaries resumed their educational efforts in the 1820s. Protestant groups opened schools in what would become Ontario, combining Christian instruction with training in agriculture. The goal was explicit: make Indigenous peoples into farmers so they wouldn't return to their traditional, often nomadic ways of life after graduation.

The oldest continuously operated residential school in Canada, the Mohawk Institute, opened in 1834 near Brantford, Ontario. Run by the Anglican Church, it began as a day school for boys in 1828, became a boarding school in 1832, and remained in operation until 1970—a span of nearly 140 years.

The legal foundation for the system came through a series of laws. The Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 offered Indigenous men fifty acres of land if they demonstrated sufficient "advancement" in education—but accepting this offer meant automatic enfranchisement, which stripped them of their tribal affiliations and treaty rights. The Gradual Enfranchisement Act of 1869 continued this approach. Both laws assumed the inherent superiority of French and British culture and the necessity of Indigenous peoples becoming Christians and farmers.

Indigenous leaders at the time argued vigorously against these laws. They saw clearly what was happening. But their objections were overruled.

The Indian Act of 1876 consolidated federal control over Indigenous communities, their land, and their finances. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission described its effect bluntly: the act "made Indians wards of the state, unable to vote in provincial or federal elections or enter the professions if they did not surrender their status, and severely limited their freedom to participate in spiritual and cultural practices."

The Davin Report

In January 1879, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald commissioned a politician named Nicholas Flood Davin to study the industrial boarding school system operating in the United States. What Davin produced—the "Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds"—became the blueprint for Canada's approach.

Davin's research was remarkably thin. He consulted with American government officials and representatives of what were then called the "Five Civilized Tribes." He spoke with church officials in Winnipeg. He visited exactly one school—a day school in Minnesota—before submitting his recommendations. Despite this limited investigation, his conclusions shaped policy for generations.

The report argued that the best way to assimilate Indigenous peoples was to start with children in residential settings, away from their families. This view was enthusiastically supported by Vital-Justin Grandin, a Catholic bishop who wrote to a government minister that children should be made to "lead a life different from their parents and cause them to forget the customs, habits & language of their ancestors."

Parliament approved $43,000 for three industrial schools in 1883. The first, Battleford Industrial School, opened that December. By 1900, there were 61 schools in operation.

The Churches Take Charge

The government funded the system, but churches ran it. This arrangement was practical—the churches already had missionary infrastructure—but it also meant that religious conversion was intertwined with education from the beginning.

At the system's peak in 1931, eighty schools operated simultaneously. The Catholic Church ran the largest share: 44 schools administered by sixteen dioceses and about three dozen religious communities. The Anglican Church operated 21 schools. The United Church of Canada ran 13. Presbyterians operated 2.

This distribution reflected missionary history rather than the general population's religious makeup. Catholics had been doing missionary work among Indigenous peoples since the French colonial period. Their extensive presence translated into extensive involvement in the school system.

The government provided facilities and maintenance while churches supplied teachers and curricula. It was an arrangement of convenience that would prove convenient for deflecting blame—each party could later point to the other as responsible for the system's failures and abuses.

What Happened Inside

Children arrived at residential schools and entered a world designed to unmake them.

Speaking their own languages was forbidden. Practicing their own spiritual traditions was forbidden. In many schools, punishment awaited those who violated these rules. The system was designed as total immersion—surrounding children with European-Canadian culture while cutting off all contact with their own.

The documented abuses go far beyond cultural suppression. Physical abuse was widespread. Sexual abuse occurred across the system. Children were separated from siblings. Many were given new names. Their hair was cut. Their traditional clothing was taken.

And they died. Over 4,000 student deaths have been documented, but researchers estimate the true number exceeds 6,000. The primary killer was disease, particularly tuberculosis. The schools were often overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and inadequately heated. Nutrition was frequently substandard. When disease swept through, it found ideal conditions for spread.

Many of the dead were buried in unmarked graves on school grounds. Their families sometimes weren't notified. Efforts continue today to locate and identify these burial sites.

A System That Failed on Its Own Terms

By the 1930s, government officials had reached an awkward conclusion: the residential school system wasn't working. Even by its own cruel logic—producing Indigenous people who would seamlessly integrate into European-Canadian society—it was a failure. Students emerged traumatized, caught between worlds, belonging fully to neither their original communities nor the society that claimed to be civilizing them.

The system was also expensive to maintain, and the physical condition of many schools had deteriorated badly.

Robert Hoey, a senior official in Indian Affairs, argued against expanding the system. Writing in 1936, he pointed out the absurdity of building new schools "while the money at our disposal is insufficient to keep the schools already erected in a proper state of repair." He proposed expanding day schools instead—a less disruptive approach that would allow children to remain with their families.

The churches resisted. The United Church, the Anglican Church, and the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate argued that the solution wasn't to restructure the system but to intensify it. They wanted more residential schools, not fewer.

The Shift to Integration

After World War II, policy began changing. The number of First Nations students in day schools operated by Indian Affairs grew from 9,532 in 1945 to 17,947 in 1955. A 1951 amendment to the Indian Act allowed the federal government to make agreements with provinces and school boards to educate Indigenous students in public schools.

This marked a philosophical shift from assimilation through segregation to integration. Indigenous children would attend the same schools as everyone else.

But the pattern of removing children from their families continued in a different form. The same 1951 amendment included a provision allowing provincial laws to apply to Indigenous peoples on reserves when federal laws didn't cover a subject. This included child welfare.

Provincial child welfare officials entered Indigenous communities with no training in their cultures or traditions. They assessed families using European-Canadian standards. Traditional diets of game, fish, and berries were deemed inadequate nutrition. Housing that didn't match suburban expectations was considered unfit. Children were removed in vast numbers.

This period, spanning roughly from the late 1950s through the 1980s, became known as the Sixties Scoop. Children were placed in foster homes or welfare facilities—including, ironically, former residential schools repurposed as child welfare institutions. Many were taken without the consent of their parents or community elders. Many were placed with non-Indigenous families, often far from their original communities.

The pattern was the same, even if the paperwork was different: Indigenous children removed from their families and cultures, placed in the care of institutions that neither understood nor valued their heritage.

The Last Schools Close

The final federally funded residential school closed in 1997. That date surprises many people who assume the system ended much earlier. Some Canadians alive today attended residential schools. Many more are the children of survivors.

By the time the last school closed, the system had operated for more than 160 years. Multiple generations had passed through it. The trauma it inflicted didn't disappear when the buildings closed—it echoed forward through families and communities.

Survivors often struggled with what they had experienced. Post-traumatic stress, substance abuse, difficulty forming attachments, fractured relationships with their own children—the consequences took many forms. Parents who had never experienced normal family life because they spent their childhoods in institutions had to figure out how to raise children without models to follow.

Communities that had lost their languages, their ceremonies, and their traditional knowledge had to rebuild from fragments. Some of what was lost can never be recovered. Elders who might have passed down oral traditions died without successors. Languages that existed only in living memory fell silent.

Reckoning and Recognition

Beginning in 2008, official apologies began. Politicians and religious leaders acknowledged the harm done by the system. Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a formal apology in Parliament that year.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was established to investigate the system's history and effects. After years of gathering testimony and documents, the commission released its final report in 2015. The finding was stark: the residential school system constituted cultural genocide.

Cultural genocide differs from physical genocide in method but not in intent. The goal isn't to kill people directly—it's to destroy a culture, to eliminate what makes a people distinct. By forcibly transferring children to another group, suppressing languages and spiritual practices, and systematically dismantling family and community structures, the residential school system attempted precisely this kind of destruction.

In 2022, Pope Francis traveled to Canada and acknowledged the system as genocide. The House of Commons passed a motion that same year calling for recognition of the residential school system as genocide.

Work continues to identify unmarked graves at former school sites. Each discovery renews public attention and grief. The remains of children who died far from home, whose families may never have been told what happened to them, are slowly being found and honored.

Understanding the Scope

Numbers help convey scale, but they can also obscure individual suffering. Here are the numbers: approximately 150,000 children passed through the system over its history. More than 6,000 died. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools. The system operated in most provinces and territories across Canada.

Behind each of these numbers is a child who was taken from a family. A mother who watched her son or daughter leave and didn't know when—or whether—they would return. A community that grew quieter as its young people disappeared into distant institutions. A culture that lost the chance to pass itself to the next generation in the natural way, through daily life and shared experience.

The residential school system was not an aberration or an accident. It was deliberate policy, openly stated, consistently pursued across more than a century and a half. It reflected what the dominant society believed about Indigenous peoples: that their cultures were obstacles to be removed, their identities errors to be corrected, their very existence as distinct peoples a problem to be solved.

That this belief was sincerely held makes it no less destructive. That churches administered the system in the name of Christian charity makes it no less cruel. That government officials genuinely thought they were helping makes the harm no less real.

The children who survived the system and built lives afterward, the communities that maintained their identities despite systematic attempts at destruction, the languages and traditions that persisted in fragments and are now being revived—these represent not only tragedy but also extraordinary resilience. The system set out to kill the Indian in the child. It failed. But the attempt itself, and the suffering it caused, can never be undone.