- Indian residential schools operated in Canada between the 1870s and 1990s.
- The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administrated by churches that had the nominal objective of educating aboriginal children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways.
- They were government sponsored religious schools established to assimilate indigenous children into euro-Canadian culture.
- Father Joseph Hugonnard, principal, with staff and aboriginal students of the school.
- About 150,000
- 80 in Canada, 22 in Saskatchewan
- Trying to change their religion from aboriginal to Euro-Canadian.
- Students were discouraged from speaking their first language or practicing native traditions. If they were caught, they would experience severe punishment.
- Gordon Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, was closed in 1996.
- The Sixties Scoop refers to a practice that occurred in Canada of taking, or “scooping up”, Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes or adoption.
- It began in the late 1950s and persisted to the 1980s.
- Provincial Child Welfare Agencies chose to remove children from their homes.
- They were put into Residential Schools. Into foster houses and put up for adoption.
- The purpose was to ruin the First Nation culture.
- Cultural genocide or cultural cleansing is a concept that lawyer Raphael Lemkin distinguished in 1944 as a component of genocide.
- The negatives were that they were taken away from their families and forced to learn a different religion but in my opinion there weren’t any positives.
- There were big impacts because they were not treated right in the schools and they didn’t get to grow up with their real families which could cause a big impact on their life.
- The First Nations will never forget about the schools so some might not ever forgive the people for what they did to their culture.
Blog Writing Prompt #3
Published
Jayke Smolinski 