Canadian Indian Residential Schools

What happened

Between approximately 1831 and 1996, the federal government of Canada — and prior to Confederation, the Province of Canada — funded a national network of residential schools whose stated purpose was the assimilation of Indigenous children (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) into Euro-Canadian culture. The schools were operated under federal contract by four Christian denominations: the Roman Catholic Church (which operated approximately 60 per cent of the schools through various dioceses, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Jesuits, the Sisters of Charity, the Grey Nuns, and other orders), the Anglican Church of Canada, the United Church of Canada (and its predecessor Methodist Church), and the Presbyterian Church in Canada.

The system grew through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, peaking at approximately 80 schools operating simultaneously in the 1930s. Approximately 150,000 Indigenous children passed through the system across its full duration. Attendance was compelled by federal statute (the Indian Act and its amendments) from 1894 onward, with parents subject to criminal prosecution for keeping their children at home.

The school system was structurally designed for cultural separation: children were removed to schools at significant distances from their home communities, prohibited from speaking their first languages, prohibited from practising their cultural and spiritual traditions, and held under religious instruction conducted in English or French.

What the inquiries established

A series of public inquiries through the 1990s and 2000s — initiated under pressure from the survivor community and from disclosures of abuse in specific schools (notably St Anne's Residential School, Fort Albany, Ontario, which produced criminal convictions of staff in the late 1990s) — culminated in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2006, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. The Settlement Agreement established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which conducted hearings from 2008 to 2014.

The TRC's six-volume Final Report, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, was released on 2 June 2015. Its principal findings:

• The Canadian residential-school system was, in the Commission's formal finding, an instrument of "cultural genocide" — the destruction of those structures and practices that allow Indigenous groups to continue as distinct cultural entities.
• The Commission documented at least 3,200 deaths of children in the school system from confirmed institutional records, with an estimated true total likely much higher because school-level death records were systematically incomplete and many children were buried in unmarked graves at the school sites.
• The Commission documented systematic physical, sexual, and emotional abuse across the institutional record of the schools, varying by school and by period but pervasive across the system's full duration.
• The Commission issued 94 Calls to Action addressed to federal, provincial, and territorial governments; to the four operating denominations; to professional bodies; and to civil society.

Subsequent confirmations

In May 2021, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the ground-penetrating-radar identification of approximately 215 probable unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (operated by the Catholic Oblates of Mary Immaculate, 1890–1969). Subsequent radar surveys at other former school sites, including Marieval Indian Residential School (Saskatchewan, ~751 probable graves identified in June 2021) and others, have added to the documented record. The radar surveys do not establish causes of death; they establish the existence of substantial numbers of previously-unmarked burials at school sites.

In April 2022, an apostolic visit by Pope Francis to Canada included a formal apology delivered at Maskwacis, Alberta on 25 July 2022 acknowledging the role of "many members of the Church and of religious communities" in the schools.

Denominational responses

The Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada issued formal apologies in 1993 and 1986 respectively. The Presbyterian Church in Canada issued its apology in 1994. The Catholic Church — operating through multiple semi-autonomous dioceses and religious orders rather than a single national entity — issued partial apologies through individual dioceses and orders over the 1990s and 2000s, culminating in the Pope's 2022 visit.

Significance

The Canadian residential-school case is the largest documented multi-denominational institutional-abuse system in North American religious history. The TRC's official-state determination of "cultural genocide" is one of the strongest formal-institutional findings of any state inquiry into a religiously-operated institutional system. The case is the foundational North American reference for the parallel United States Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative inquiry of 2022, and is closely linked methodologically to the Australian Bringing Them Home inquiry (1997) into the analogous Australian Stolen Generations system.

Sources

• Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) — six-volume Final Report, summary volume and Calls to Action.
• National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, University of Manitoba — archive of TRC hearings, survivor statements, and supporting documentation.
• Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, 8 May 2006.
• Pope Francis, address at Maskwacis, Alberta, 25 July 2022.
• John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (University of Manitoba Press, 1999).
• J. R. Miller, Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (University of Toronto Press, 1996).