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Suffer the Children: The Tragic Fate of Vulnerable Kids in Canadian Governmental Care

Khalid Elhassan December 14, 2024 13 min

Canada - Children in an Indian Residential School — Children in an Indian Residential School. Encyclopedia Britannica

16. Governmental Kidnapping of Indigenous Children

Students at a US Indian boarding school. National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition

To Canada’s south, American officialdom oscillated between attempts to push the Natives into impoverished reservations at the milder end of things, and genocidal attempts to outright exterminate them at the more extreme end. In all scenarios, both in the US and Canada, the consequences were often 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, thousands died as a result, and their bodies were dumped in unmarked graves on school grounds.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.