Wow
Canada has a very dark history. I didn't know
The system was designed as an immersion program: in many schools, children were prohibited from (and sometimes punished for) speaking their own languages or practising their own faiths. In the 20th century, former students of the schools have claimed that officials and teachers had practised
cultural genocide and
ethnocide. Because of the relatively isolated nature of the schools, there was an elevated rate of physical and sexual abuse. Corporal punishment was often justified by a belief that it was the only way to "save souls", "civilize" the savage, or punish runaways who, if they became injured or died in their efforts to return home, would leave the school legally responsible for whatever befell them. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, inadequate heating, and a lack of medical care led to high rates of influenza and
tuberculosis; in one school, death rates reached 69%.
[22] Federal policy tying funding to enrollment numbers may have made things worse, as it led to sick children being enrolled in order to boost numbers, thus introducing and spreading disease. Details of the mistreatment of students had been published numerous times throughout the 20th century. Following the government's closure of most of the schools in the 1960s, the work of indigenous activists and historians led to greater awareness by the public of the damage which the schools had caused, as well as to official government and church apologies, and a legal settlement. This has been controversial both within indigenous and non-indigenous communities.
[23]
The first residential schools were established in the 1840s and the last residential school closed in 1996.
[24] Their primary roles were to convert
Indigenous children to
Christianity and to "civilize them".
[25] In the early 19th century, Protestant missionaries opened residential schools in the current
Ontario region. The Protestant churches not only spread Christianity, but also tried to encourage the Indigenous peoples to adopt subsistence agriculture as a way to ensure they would not return to their original ways of life after graduation.
[26] For graduates to receive individual allotments of farmland, however, would require changes in the communal
reserve system, something fiercely opposed by
First Nations governments.