The residential schools

From the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth, Canada and the United States ran a system of boarding schools in which Indigenous children were taken from their families. The purpose was stated openly: to remove the language, the religion and the culture from one generation, so that the next would have nothing to inherit.

What kind of schools

They were residential schools, usually run by churches under contract to the state, often far from home. Children entered at five or six. Hair was cut, clothes exchanged, and a new name or a number issued. Speaking one's own language was punished.

Teaching was limited. Half the day went to labour — farming, carpentry, laundry, sewing — which kept the institutions running and was meant to prepare the children for lives as servants. Malnutrition was widespread, and tuberculosis spread through crowded dormitories.

Timeline

1879

the Carlisle school in Pennsylvania opens and becomes the model

1883

Canada establishes the first state-funded industrial schools in the west

1894

attendance is made compulsory for Indigenous children in Canada

1907

the Bryce report documents mortality of 24–42 per cent at some schools

1920

Canadian law empowers officials to remove children by force

1928–1970s

forced sterilisation occurs in several jurisdictions

1969

Canada takes over operation from the churches

1978

the United States passes the Indian Child Welfare Act

1996

the last residential school in Canada closes

2008

Canada apologises officially; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is established

2015

the commission concludes: cultural genocide

2021

ground-penetrating radar begins identifying unmarked graves at the schools

The numbers

Around 150,000 children passed through the Canadian system. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission documented at least 3,200 deaths and judged the real figure substantially higher, since many schools stopped keeping statistics after the Bryce report of 1907 made the numbers embarrassing. In the United States at least 500 schools followed similar practices; a federal review in 2022 identified over 400 institutions and hundreds of burial sites.

What was lost

Language loss is the most measurable lasting effect. Of the roughly seventy-eight Indigenous languages still spoken in Canada, the great majority have under a thousand speakers, and only three are reckoned secure in the long term. A language normally passes from parent to child at home, and the system was designed precisely to interrupt that transfer.

The effects continue across generations. Parents who had themselves grown up without family, without language and often with abuse behind them had not seen how a home works. This is documented in the commission's material as a principal finding, not as a supposition.

Why it stands here

It is easy to read this as a closed matter. The last school in Canada shut in 1996 — the year the DVD player went on sale. This is not distant history, and the children who attended are middle-aged people today.