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Squaring the Circle: How Canada is Dealing with the Legacy of Its Indian Residential Schools Experiment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2019
Extract
Canada, like Australia, is belatedly confronting a problem that has long been denied and ignored. Each country is now reckoning the social costs of past policies which sought to achieve the forced assimilation of indigenous children. In Canada this policy was mainly implemented through laws requiring the compulsory attendance of Indian children at school. Some 100,000 children were directed to church-operated residential schools where their cultural transformation could be effected in isolation from their families and the outside world. That isolation left them highly vulnerable to abuse and neglect.
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Notes
This article has been published in Vol 6 No 1 Australian Journal of Human Rights, pp. 188–217 (2000) and is reproduced with the permission of the editors of the AJHR.Google Scholar
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