The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Indigenous children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream white Canadian society.

Residential schools were boarding schools for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children and youth, financed by the federal government, but staffed and run by several Christian religious institutions. Children were separated from their families and communities, sometimes by force, and lived in and attended classes at the schools for most of the year. Often, the residential schools were located far from the student’s home communities. The schools were in existence for well over 100 years, and successive generations of children and families from the same communities endured this experience.

The impact of the residential school system was severe, resulting in  physical, emotional, sexual, and medical abuse and neglect. Though it will take time and commitment to health the relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada, the reconciliation process has begun.

More information can be found from the Assembly of First Nations and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.

Locations of Searches for Unmarked Graves of Indigenous Children at Residential School Sites:

The term “Sixties Scoop” refers to the mass removal of Aboriginal children from their families into the child welfare system. This was done, in most cases, without the consent of their families or Bands. The Sixties Scoop refers to a particular phase of a larger history, and not to an specific government policy. Although the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and into state care existed before the 1960’s, the drastic overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in the child welfare system accelerated in the 1960’s, when Aboriginal children were seized and taken from their homes and places, in most cases, into middle-class Euro-Canadian families. This overrepresentation continues today on a national scale.

More information can be found at the University of British Columbia.