A Well-Intentioned Plan to Help Indigenous Kids that Backfired
Canada established a network of mandatory boarding schools for Indigenous children in the nineteenth century, funded by the government and administered by Christian churches. Known as the Indian Residential School System, it sought to assimilate Indigenous kids into mainstream white Canadian culture. In theory, the assimilationist intentions were benign. At least compared to what took place to Canada’s south, where American authorities did not even pretend to want to assimilate the Natives. Indeed, the one time that Natives voluntarily settled down in the US, established towns, and emulated Europeans, their reward was expulsion from their lands and the tragic Trail of Tears.
US officialdom oscillated between attempts to push the Natives into impoverished reservations at the milder end of things, or genocidal attempts to outright exterminate them at the more extreme end. In all scenarios, both in the US and Canada, the results were varying degrees of tragic and horrific for the Natives. In Canada, the Residential School System kidnapped Indigenous children from their families and placed them in boarding schools where they were often subjected to neglect, sundry abuses, and cruel treatment. As seen below, if the goal was to help, the effort backfired. Thousands died, and their bodies were dumped in unmarked graves on school grounds.
