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The residential schools
The residential schools were boarding schools run by government and churches, where Indigenous children were placed by law and kept from their families for months or years at a time. The purpose was stated openly by those who ran the system — "kill the Indian, save the man" is a quotation from the founder of the Carlisle school in Pennsylvania. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that the system constituted cultural genocide. From 2021, thousands of unmarked graves have been identified at the schools using ground-penetrating radar. Language loss is the most lasting effect: most Indigenous languages in North America now have fewer than a thousand speakers.
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