Canadian Indian Residential School System

Canadian Indian Residential School System

The Indian residential schools of Canada were a network of "residential" (boarding) schools for Aboriginal peoples of Canada (First Nations, Metis, and Inuit ) funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs, and adminstered by Christian churches, most notably the Catholic Church in Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada. The system had origins in pre-Confederation times, but was primarily active following the passage of the Indian Act in 1876, until the mid-twentieth century. The last residential school was not closed until 1996.

There has long been signifigant historigraphical and popular controversy about the conditions experienced by students in the residential schools. However, a new consensus emerged in the early twentieth-first century that the schools did signifigant harm to Aboriginal children by removing them from their families, depriving them of their ancestral languages, and exposing many of them to physical and sexual abuse at the hands of their teachers and other students. This consensus was symbolized by the June 11, 2008 public apology offered, not only by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on behalf of the Government of Canada, but also by the leaders of all the other parties in the Canadian House of Commons As well, just nine days previous, the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to uncover the truth about the schools. The Comission's hearings were still ongoing in October of 2012.