What was the federal Indian residential school system?
Answer
A federally administered system of about 139 schools operated from the 1880s to 1996 in partnership with Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches, designed to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian society; about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children attended, with many subjected to abuse, malnutrition, and inadequate education.
Explanation
The federal Indian residential school system was a federally administered system of about 139 schools operated from the 1880s to 1996 in partnership with Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches. The system was designed to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian society. About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children attended, with many subjected to abuse, malnutrition, and inadequate education. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 2008 to 2015 documented the system's effects in comprehensive detail and called the system 'cultural genocide'. The last federally administered school (Gordon Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan) closed in 1996.
The residential school system originated in the 1880s under Sir John A. Macdonald's Conservative government. The 1879 Davin Report (commissioned by Macdonald and written by Nicholas Flood Davin) recommended industrial boarding schools modelled on US Indian schools. The first federally funded residential schools opened in 1883 in Manitoba (Battleford Industrial School) and the North-West Territories (Qu'Appelle Industrial School in present-day Saskatchewan). Mandatory attendance was introduced in 1894 and tightened in 1920 (when Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott pushed through mandatory attendance for all 7-to-15-year-old Indian children). At the system's peak in the 1930s, about 80 schools operated across Canada.
Conditions were widely catastrophic. Children were forcibly removed from their families, often hundreds of kilometres from home. They were forbidden to speak Indigenous languages or practise their cultures, with severe punishment for violations. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse was widespread. Malnutrition was systemic, including federally documented nutritional experiments on residential-school students at six locations from 1942 to 1952 (Mosby et al., 2013, documented these in Histoire sociale / Social History). Tuberculosis killed many students; a 1907 federal report by Dr. Peter Bryce documented mortality rates of about 24 per cent and made recommendations that were largely ignored.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008 to 2015) estimated 4,000 to 6,000 deaths at residential schools, though post-2021 unmarked-graves announcements at Tk'emlups, Cowessess, ?aq'am, and other former school sites have suggested the actual death toll may be substantially higher. The federal government's June 11, 2008 apology by Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledged the system's harms. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2007 provided about 1.9 billion dollars in compensation to about 80,000 surviving students. Pope Francis's April 2022 Vatican apology and July 2022 Canadian apology specifically addressed the Catholic Church's role. The TRC's 94 Calls to Action of 2015 framework continues to guide federal, provincial, Indigenous, and church reconciliation work.
Why this matters for your test
The federal Indian residential school system caused multi-generational harm to Indigenous communities and is one of the most consequential injustices in Canadian history. Recognising the 1880s to 1996 operation and the about 150,000 Indigenous children attendance gives candidates two specific anchors.
Source: Truth and Reconciliation Commission; Library and Archives Canada
