Residential Schooling
“They washed away practically everything from our minds, all the things an Indian needed to help himself, to think the way a human person should in order to survive.” – John Tootoosis, former residential school student (The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2012)
The impacts of European influence on Indigenous communities was not limited to early arrival. Beginning around the early 1880s was the formation of the residential schooling system, which has in recent years been acknowledged as a form of “cultural genocide”.
The passage and implementations of the British North America Act in 1867, and the Indian Act in 1876 required the government to educate Indigenous youth as a means to get them familiar with a changing society (Miller, 2012). The vision that Indigenous leaders had of building a better future for their children would be radically altered in attempts of assimilation. Over the next 100 years, Indigenous children from across Canada would be taken from their families and placed into government schools run primarily by the Roman Catholic Church. They were stripped of any ties they had to their culture and forced into a new, frightening way of life.
The last residential school in Canada was closed in 1998. It took 10 years after this for the first formal apology to be made in June of 2008 in the House of Commons.
Impacts
Many children were victims of both physical and mental abuse, others plagued with disease that often resulted in death. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Council of Canada chair, the total number of deaths as a result of this system could be upwards of 6000 youth (Miller, 2012). The research is limited on the impacts of residential schooling. However, several have attempted to examine both the individual and intergenerational effects. These include psychological trauma, as well as physiological impacts due to malnutrition and abuse. Bougie and Senecal (2010), using the Aboriginal Peoples Survey on Children and Youth done in 2006, concluded that former attendees and their children were more likely to live in low income households and exhibit lower school achievement.
More on low income and education quality in the section on Today’s Communities.