← Back to the front page

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

12. Residential Schools Produced Graduates Who Were Neither Indigenous, Nor White

Perhaps the final tragic twist in a tale already full of the tragic is that the end result of the Indigenous kids’ education was often adults who were unable to fit back into their original communities. After years of speaking only English or French in boarding schools, many had forgotten their Indigenous languages by the time they graduated, and were no longer able to communicate with their relatives. However, they were still Indigenous. Despite the Residential School System’s professed assimilationist intent, the graduates were denied assimilation because of the racist and exclusionary attitudes of mainstream white Canadian society.

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.