Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was a truth and reconciliation commission active in Canada from 2008 to 2015, organized by the parties of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.
Commissioner Littlechild speaking at a TRC event in Inuvik, 2011
They Came for the Children, published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Canadian Indian residential school system
The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000, mostly from disease.
The Qu'Appelle Indian Industrial School in Lebret, Assiniboia, North-West Territories, c. 1885
Study period at a Roman Catholic Indian Residential School in Fort Resolution, NWT
Fur traders, in what is now Canada, trading with an Indigenous person in 1777
Mohawk Institute Residential School, c. 1932