Residential Schools

For well over a century, Canada forced vast numbers of Aboriginal children to leave their families and live in institutions called "residential schools". This also happened in the United States. Despite the name, these institutions had more in common with prisons, communist "re-education camps" or even forced labor camps than with ordinary schools.

It has been reported that it was not unusual for 25% to 50% of the children who were taken to these "schools" to die there. In at least one school, the percentage of children who did not get out alive was approximately 75%.

Those who did survive the ordeal of residential schools have not been quick to talk about what happened there, but since the 1990's more and more testimony is coming out.

Survivors report extreme neglect such as denial of life-saving medical assistance, failure to quarantine children infected with deadly, contagious diseases and malnutrition. In some cases, the malnutrion was a deliberate policy in which experiments were conducted to determine the minimum amount of food that could be provided to the children to keep them alive.

In addition to the neglect, the children were subjected to forced sterilization, institutionalized sexual abuse, rape and severe beatings. Many children died from the beatings.

The schools were funded by the government of Canada whose agents enforced attendance at them, but the schools were run by churches. The churches involved were some of the largest and most respected in Canada including the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church and the United Church of Canada.

The schools were in operation from at least 1820 until at least 1983. With the exception of a few articles and reports, especially in the early 20th century, the nature of the residential schools was not widely discussed in Canada and was virtually unknown in the rest of the world until the 1990s. At that time, a few victims of the schools began to seek justice in the courts.

Criminal charges were laid against some of the staff of the residential schools. Also, lawsuits were filed against the churches involved and the Canadian federal government. The Canadian courts ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the matter of vicarious liability of the churches and the government for their roles. Although we may hope that justice would require this verdict in any case, the courts may not have realized that the handful of plaintiffs who came forward at first were just a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of victims who were still alive. Many more lawsuits followed. The Anglican Church of Canada has said that they may be driven to bankruptcy by this matter.

This article is a "stub", which is to say it is only the beginning. This is a huge and important topic and I have only sketched the barest outline here because I saw that there was no article on this subject at all in wikipedia.

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Residential Schools