Indian Residential Schools
Between the late 1800s and 1996, the Government of Canada and church organizations operated the Indian Residential School System. An estimated 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were removed from their families, homes, languages and lands. A part of official Canadian policy, the residential school system aimed at the complete assimilation of Indigenous people.
The schools were routinely overcrowded, underfunded, and rife with disease. Many children, weakened by malnutrition, did not survive. Mortality rates in some schools exceded 60%. As of September 2021, the Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has documented the deaths of 4,118 children. The system also became notorious for a high rate of physical and sexual abuse. Despite documentation and reporting of conditions over the years, (1907 Bryce report, letters from clergy, etc.) nothing was done.
From the Indian Residential School History & Dialogue Centre.
Health & Residential Schools
See also the Indian Residential School System in Canada research guide.
A National Crime by Call Number: ERA M55 N38 1999ISBN: 9780887553035Publication Date: 1999For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse.
- Residential schools and the effects on Indigenous health and well-being in Canada-a scoping reviewWilk et. al. (2017). The history of residential schools has been identified as having long lasting and intergenerational effects on the physical and mental well-being of Indigenous populations in Canada. Our objective was to identify the extent and range of research on residential school attendance on specific health outcomes and the populations affected.
- The lifetime effect of residential school attendance on indigenous health statusKaspar, V. (2017). I examined the health impact of lifetime Indian Residential school (IRS) attendance and the mediating influences of socioeconomic status and community adversity on health outcomes in a national sample of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
- Social Determinants of Health Inequities in Indigenous Canadians Through a Life Course Approach to Colonialism and the Residential School SystemPaul, K. J. (2019). To provide culturally sensitive care for those who have experienced intergenerational trauma, health care providers should be aware of and understand two key SDOH inequity influencing the Indigenous life course, including the residential school system and loss of socioeconomic status, over time due to colonialism.
- Circular Progress: Health and Healthcare within Albertan Indian Residential Schools, 1920 - 1950Paula Larson (2015). Dissertation.
Department officials used the inherent flaws in the system of school governance – which gave a few men ultimate power over the living conditions of thousands of children – to circumvent the responsibility they held towards the health of students. The ultimate result was a malnourished and vulnerable student population suffering from endemic disease and psychological trauma. - Mental health profiles for a sample of British Columbia's aboriginal survivors of the Canadian residential school systemPrepared for the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (2003). This research is intended to increase understanding pf the extent, types and effects of physical, sexual and psychological/emotional abuse on the mental health of a sample of Aboriginal Survivors of the residential school system.
“[I]f I were appointed by the Dominion Government for the express purpose of spreading tuberculosis, there is nothing finer in existence that the average Indian residential school.”
— N. Walker, Indian Affairs Superintendent (1948)
- Tuberculosis mortality among the students of St. Joseph's residential school in 1942-43: Historical and geographical context(2008). This chapter documents deaths among Indian children in a Canadian residential school and discusses the role of residential schools in contributing to the high rates of TB among Indigenous populations.
- Dr. Peter Bryce (1853-1932): whistleblower on residential schoolsHay et. al. (2020). In 1907, Bryce released a report drawing attention to the fact that, according to his surveys, roughly one-quarter of all Indigenous children attending residential schools had died from tuberculosis. Bryce's report named poor ventilation and poor standards of care from school officials as the primary cause of deaths as opposed to the racial susceptibility hypothesis rather popular at the time.
- Reflecting on the relationship between residential schools and TB in Canada... The dire experience of TB disease within residential schools in the Prairie Provinces of Canada was documented by Dr Peter Henderson Bryce... Bryce’s health surveys in the early 1900s revealed horrific rates of TB deaths in residential schools. He identified a single school in southern Saskatchewan where 69% of students had perished either while attending or shortly thereafter, the majority of whom succumbed to TB.
...Highly unethical nutrition experiments [were] performed on Canadian Aboriginal children at six residential schools between 1942 and 1952... In these experiments, control and treatment groups of malnourished children were denied adequate nutrition. In these experiments, parents were not informed, nor were consents obtained. Even as children died, the experiments continued. Even after the recommendations from the Nuremberg trial, these experiments continued.
From MacDonald et. al, (2014). Canada’s shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children: The need for strong medical ethics in Aboriginal health research.
- Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942-1952Mosby, I. (2013). Between 1942 and 1952, some of Canada's leading nutrition experts, in cooperation with various federal departments, conducted an unprecedented series of nutritional studies of Aboriginal communities and residential schools.
- A compendium of Aboriginal Healing Foundation research. byCall Number: ERB A446 C66 2012ISBN: 9781897285947Publication Date: 2012Includes summaries of published works produced by the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (AHF). "The AHF is committed to building effective and sustainable capacities for healing the legacy of physical and sexual abuse in the residential school system, including the intergenerational impacts (the Legacy)."
- Residential schools and the effects on Indigenous health and well-being in Canada-a scoping reviewThe empirical literature can be seen as further documenting the negative health effects of residential schooling, both among former residential school attendees and subsequent generations.
- Trauma and suicide behaviour histories among a Canadian indigenous population: An empirical exploration of the potential role of Canada's residential school systemElias et. al. (2012). In Canada, qualitative evidence has suggested that the Indian Residential School System set in motion a cycle of trauma, with some survivors reporting subsequent abuse, suicide, and other related behaviours. This is the first study to empirically demonstrate, at the population level, the mental health impact of the residential school system on survivors and their children.
- Aboriginal Peoples and Historic Trauma: The process of intergenerational transmission
2015. NCCIH. The first report in this two-part series, Aboriginal Peoples and Historic Trauma: The process of intergenerational transmission, recognizes that Aboriginal peoples' experiences are rooted in multigenerational, cumulative, and chronic trauma, injustices, and oppression. The effects of trauma can reverberate through individuals, families, communities and entire populations, resulting in a legacy of physical, psychological, and economic disparities that persist across generations.
- Canada's residential school system: measuring the intergenerational impact of familial attendance on health and mental health outcomesHackett et. al. (2016). We estimate the intergenerational relationship between the residential school (RS) attendance of an older generation family member and the physical and mental health of a younger generation.
- Parent-Child Separations and Mental Health among First Nations and Métis Peoples in Canada: Links to Intergenerational Residential School AttendanceMcQuaid et. al. (2022). First Nations children are over 17 times more likely to be removed from their families and placed in the child welfare system (CWS) than non-Indigenous children in Canada. The high rates of parent-child separation have been linked to discriminatory public services and the Indian Residential School (IRS) system, which instigated a multi-generational cycle of family disruption.
Health impacts of familial separation
"The term Sixties Scoop was coined by Patrick Johnston, author of the 1983 report Native Children and the Child Welfare System. It refers to the mass removal of Aboriginal children from their families into the child welfare system, 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 explicit government policy. Although the practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and into state care existed before the 1960s (with the residential school system, for example), the drastic overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in the child welfare system accelerated in the 1960s, when Aboriginal children were seized and taken from their homes and placed, in most cases, into middle-class Euro-Canadian families. This overrepresentation continues today." (See "the Millennial Scoop.")
Intimate integration : a history of the Sixties Scoop and the colonization of Indigenous kinship by Call Number: KX S74 N85 2020ISBN: 9781487500641Publication Date: 2020Intimate Integration utilizes an Indigenous gender analysis to identify the gendered operation of the federal Indian Act and its contribution to Indigenous child removal, over-representation in provincial child welfare systems, and transracial adoption. Specifically, women and children's involuntary enfranchisement through marriage, as laid out in the Indian Act, undermined Indigenous gender and kinship relationships.
- Familial Attendance at Indian Residential School and Subsequent Involvement in the Child Welfare System Among Indigenous Adults Born During the Sixties Scoop EraThe study found that adults with a parent who attended IRS were more likely to have spent time in foster care or in a group home during the Sixties Scoop era.
"In the case of Aboriginal mothers, stories of government involvement in family life often go back generations. The legacy of removing children from their families and communities, first through the residential schools, and then through the child protection system, continues to impact the lives of these mothers, their children and their grandchildren."
—Pivot Legal Society, Broken Promises
The "Millennium Scoop" references the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in foster care. In 2016, Indigenous children accounted for more than half of foster children under 14 in Canada, despite the fact that Indigenous youth make up only 8% of that age group. Children who go through the system are often cut off from their families and cultures. (From CBC (2018), "The Millennium Scoop: Indigenous youth say care system repeats horrors of the past.")
- Broken Promises Report - Pivot Legal SocietyAs a whole, this report argues that the system continues to fail to address the systemic factors impacting children’s well being, such as poverty, the legacy of colonialism and the lack of social supports for single mothers. We conclude that as long as those systemic factors are ignored, B.C.’s government is not in a position to claim that it is genuinely acting in the best interest of children.
- Deviant Constructions: How Governments Preserve Colonial Narratives of Addictions and Poor Mental Health to Intervene into the Lives of Indigenous Children and Families in CanadaColonial projects in Canada have a long history of violently intervening into the personal lives and social structures of Indigenous peoples. These interventions are associated with elevated rates of addictions and mental health issues among Indigenous peoples.