Portage la Prairie - A group of students disembark school bus and enter the Portage La Prairie Indian Residential School, 1957, Library and Archives Canada, accession 1976-281 NPC, item 5305131.
Pupils of Mohawk Institute, Brantford, Ont., Sept. 1934 [the first residential school], Library and Archives Canada, accession 1971-232 NPC, item 3649266.
In 1883 the Government of Canada began funding residential schools in Canada and the Indian Residential School System (IRSS) was created. The goal of the IRSS was to assimilate First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children into white, Christian, settler society. It is estimated that 150,000 children were taken from their communities and forced to attend residential schools (The Canadian Encyclopedia).
UBC's Indigenous Foundations program explains: "[t]he system forcibly separated children from their families for long periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their heritage and culture or to speak their own languages. Children were severely punished if these, among other, strict rules were broken. Former students of residential schools have spoken of horrendous abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological" (Hanson, Gamez, & Manuel, 2009). An estimated 139 residential schools operated across Canada (though many believe this number is higher) until the last residential school, The Gordon Residential School in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, closed in 1996.
With the release of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), the knowledge of the abuse and burials of children at residential schools was made public. However, no real action was undertaken to locate the remains of missing children until May 2021, when 215 unmarked graves were uncovered by the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School. Since then, the remains of over 10,000 children have been found at 11 former residential school sites. As of September 2022, 128 schools still need to be searched.
