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ABSTRACT
This paper provides a brief history of the residential school system in Canada. One of Canada's key attempts to assimilate Indigenous peoples was through the use of "education" by the government and churches. For over 150 years thousands of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes, families and communities. This paper also focuses on the impact which these colonial schools and government policies had on Indigenous children, their families and communities. Many students who survived the schools have described a state of being incarcerated in them. This work demonstrates the fact that, despite the government's systematic and deliberate attempts to suppress Indigenous peoples and their cultures, its policies and actions have largely failed. Indigenous peoples continue to speak their own narratives, speak their own truths and revitalize and build on their knowledges and ancestral systems from their diverse perspectives.
INTRODUCTION
Any examination of Indigenous Education in Canada must begin with the understanding that Indigenous peoples had, and still have, their own knowledge systems and philosophies of educating/teaching their children, as well as highly complex, efficient and well-developed systems to help their children and society to function effectively. Before the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal groups in North America were largely independent and self-governing. They determined their own philosophies and approaches to cultural, economic, religious, familial and educational endeavours (Bombay, Matheson and Anisman, 2009: 7).
These Indigenous knowledge systems were disrupted over 150 years ago, though, beginning in the mid-19th century, when First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were removed from their families and forced to attend Canada's residential schools. The residential school system is widely-recognized as having included industrial schools, boarding schools, and homes for students, including hostels and billets. However, it also included convents, day schools, mission schools, sanitoriums and settlement camps (Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2010). The report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People of 1996 states that, of all the steps taken to achieve the assimilation of Indigenous peoples, none was more obviously a creature of Canada's paternalism toward Aboriginal people than its stern education program.
This paper provides a critical examination of the history of residential schools in Canada. It examines Canadian federal government policies against Indigenous peoples, the experiences of the children who were forced to attend...