5 years after Kamloops: History of Canadian Residential schools
November 2026
By Flora Tu
Former Kamloops Indian Residential School, British Columbia, circa 1930
Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Fonds Deschâtelets
On May 27, 2021, Indigenous nation Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced that ground-penetrating radar identified 215 suspected unmarked graves near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. For many Canadians, the announcement sparked national mourning and calls for reform. For Indigenous communities, it was an affirmation of what had long been known through their testimonies and memories.
Generations of Indigenous children were placed in residential schools created and administered by the Canadian government and churches for over a century. Designed with the “civilizing mission” in mind, these schools intended to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian society by separating them from their families and forbidding cultural practices in the institutions, detaching them from their culture. From the creation of the Mohawk Institute in 1824 to the closing of Muscowequan Indian Residential School in 1997, over 150,000 children attended these institutions. Many did not return.
The Civilizing Mission and Creation
The Kamloops incident was the legacy of a centuries-long European project for Indigenous assimilation. Churches established institutions for Indigenous education as early as 1620 in the overarching missionary objectives in European colonization. Louis XIII instructed his Company of One Hundred Associates “to bring the people who inhabit [Canada] to the knowledge of the true God, to civilize them and to instruct them in the faith.” The Virginia Company Charter declared that settlers were to bring Christianity to “infidels and savages” living in “darkness and miserable ignorance” to “humane civility.” Consequently, Indigenous faiths and traditions like Potlatch and traditional spirituality were condemned by the settlers and viewed as inferior to the “exclusive truth” of their God.
As westward expansion diminished Indigenous political power and governments increasingly quelled resistance with assimilation, politician Nicholas Flood Davin observed industrial schools in the United States at the request of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald. His 1879 “Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds” recommended the adoption of the American model, suggesting federal funding of existing Canadian Christian boarding schools (presumably including the aforementioned Mohawk Institute) and further creation of similar institutions.
Davin’s report reflects settlers’ attitudes toward Indigenous people and was the foundation of the government-backed residential school system. That the purpose of residential schools was to intentionally separate children from their parents is undeniable. Davin himself stated that the only viable way in “dealing with the less civilized or wholly barbarous tribes, was to separate the children from the parents”. The Macdonald government approved the funding of residential schools in 1883, “based in large measure on the 1879 government-commissioned report of Nicholas Flood Davin”.
“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”: the Residential School
In addition to family separation through a boarding school system, residential schools sought to eliminate individual culture by severely punishing those who practiced Indigenous traditions and spoke their languages. Siblings rarely interacted as boys and girls were separated. Assimilation happened not only procedurally—it was solidified in their curriculum of civilization and Christianization. In addition to basic academics such as arithmetic and history, they provided instruction in agriculture for boys and in domestic housekeeping for girls.
Unsurprisingly, the bible was a major component in the curriculum and provided the basis of the taught family values: mother and father practicing their respective gender roles to provide for their children. Resultingly, a cruel contradiction was created, in which family was praised as a moral foundation while the institution actively prevented Indigenous children from experiencing the unattainable.
Health
In 1907, chief medical officer Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce found that roughly 24% of the 1,537 pupils documented in the returns from 15 visited schools were reported dead, and 3,201 deaths are confirmed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission today. Despite this, there was no formal policy for investigating student deaths until 1935. A 1967 report on Saskatchewan residential schools noted that the institutions often relied on a central purchasing office in Winnipeg, explaining the nationwide documentation of rotten food. Some accounts describe hungry children “eating from the swill barrel, picking out soggy bits of food that was intended for the pigs”.
In the 1940s and 50s, food health officials and scientists saw this rampant malnourishment as an opportunity for experiment, as whether a vitamin or mineral “fixes” malnutrition cannot be tested unless the subjects are already deficient. In 1947, Lionel Pett, creator of Canada's Food Guide, led researchers to test nutritional “interventions” on nearly 1,000 already malnourished children. Some were deliberately left without dietary improvements to act as control groups.
Discipline/Abuse
Corporal punishments such as strapping, thrashing, and flogging were regularly administered as a means to discipline specific wrongdoings such as foul language, refusal to work, bedwetting, flirting, impertinence, and notably, runaway and truancy. The word “epidemic” frequently appears in official documents describing the numerous cases of student runaways, and students in such instances were most often met with severe corporal punishments following the schools’ discovery. Confinement and food deprivation was also used as a disciplinary measure for notable offenses, such as in one case of runaway students at Kenora Presbyterian School. In a magazine interview, Principal S. T. Robinson admitted to confining the two children to their room in their underwear, with only bare mattresses, and gave them only bread and milk. Lighter punishments like earlier bedtimes, loss of playtime, and lines were generally administered to more trivial offenses.
Confronted with these events a minority of present-day Canadians often wish to downplay their severity—one such argument is that these disciplinary measures were not a unique phenomenon as regular boarding schools also administered them. In a piece where he also suggested that Indigenous parents willingly sent their children residential schools because they provided an environment better than “conditions in the home [...] not at all conducive to healthy child raising”, Mark DeWolf noted that corporal punishments were present “in schools of all kinds” suggesting a common—thus historically reasonable—nature of residential schools. Distinctly, however, residential schools were geographically isolated, operating away from the few that would condemn unreasonable punishments.
Indian Affairs official R. A. Hoey admitted in 1942 that “everything humanly possible [was] done to discourage Indian parents from visiting their children at [the department’s] residential schools”. This privacy enabled a blurry line between punishment and abuse as there was virtually no accountability mechanism, especially in the late 19th century. Most in the schools were kept outside the public eye, and poorly managed internally. As early as 1898, matron Elizabeth Shaw wrote a letter detailing physical and mental abuse and poor health conditions occurring at Crosby Boys’ Home in Lax Kw’alaams to the Methodist Church running the school. After a lackluster investigation, the founder of the school declared Shaw mentally unfit, leading to her residency at the Brockville asylum in Ontario.
Only eleven staff were convicted of abuse in over a century of residential school existence (prior to 1987), and twenty-one more were convicted later. These cases are almost exclusively sexual assault cases, connoting that other forms of abuse went unpunished. The number of reported injuries from physical and sexual abuse amount to 37,951 as of 31 January 2015.
Decline
By the late 1930s, senior Indian Affairs officials found residential schools much too costly. Schooling 250 children amounts to $40,000 annually, while educating the same number in day schools would cost only $7,000. It wasn’t until the 1951 Indian Act amendments that the federal government had the authority to begin this shift, and the federal government had invested over $15.5 million in provincial schools for 15,550 First Nations pupils by 1967.
The amendments passed were far from an attempt at self-vindication from an admitted social injustice—it came from a place of financial distress and long-held beliefs of assimilation. The amendment examining committee concluded that “wherever and whenever possible, Indian children should be educated in association with other children”, “in order to prepare Indian children to take their places as citizens”. This policy of integration was merely a cheaper and newer form of assimilation.
The 1951 Indian Act revision allowed more services available Indigenous reserves, enabling provincial child-welfare agencies further access to Indigenous reserves. Social workers interpreted the widespread poverty created by centuries of unfair treaties and colonial policies as parental neglect. Consequently, governments forced over 20,000 children into foster care and adoption, almost always in non-Indigenous homes. Later named the “60s’ Scoop”, this phenomenon resulted in the same loss of culture as the residential schools; away from parents that carry generations of tradition, the child loses their touch with their history. Many survivors were made strangers to their own communities while never fully belonging to the non-Indigenous society they were placed into.
Canada’s increasing secularism marked 1969 as a historical turning point as the federal government ended its formal partnership with the churches and took greater direct control over the remaining schools. After this takeover, the number of residential schools declined rapidly, with only sixteen residences still operating by 1980 and the last school closing in 1997.
Aftermath
Settlements and Apologies
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, thousands of former students brought lawsuits over abuse and harms in residential schools. This work culminated in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, approved in 2006 and implemented in 2007. It included the Common Experience Payment, the Independent Assessment Process for sexual and serious physical abuse claims, healing supports, commemoration, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
This settlement combined with political pressure in parliament led to a historic apology for residential schools from former Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper on June 11, 2008. In the House of Commons, He acknowledged that the schools intended to “remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures” and “to assimilate them into the dominant culture.” He also recognized that these objectives were based on the belief that Indigenous cultures and spiritual beliefs were “inferior and unequal.”
Kamloops
The 2021 announcement at Kamloops brought residential schools back into the center of Canadian public discussion. Mere days later, former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered all flags on federal buildings to be lowered to half-mast. This period lasted over five months—the longest in Canadian history. In August 2021, the federal government announced $83 million for the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund. This goes toward research initiatives including searching and documenting burial sites, finding and sorting school records, and commemorating residential school victims.
While residential school denial existed well before the 2021, such as Senator Lynn Beyak’s 2017 comment about the supposed “good” done by residential-school staff, the national and international attention of the Kamloops announcement relit the popularity of denialism. Cases of the aforementioned Wolfe and Beyak that occurred before Kamloops often minimized the schools’ harms or exonerated officials. After Kamloops, however, denial became increasingly centered on forensics.
Radar identifies bodies through detecting soil anomalies rather than visual confirmations, and the lack of excavation suggests to some that the findings were exaggerated or false. The Frontier Centre published pieces arguing that the Kamloops “falsehood” had “no evidence of mass graves”, and the Centre for Human Rights Research reported that priests, pundits, and politicians had described the search for unmarked graves as a “huge lie” or “mass grave hoax”.
The frustration denialists express toward reconciliation politics gives them a rationale for increasingly blatant minimization. Conservative Dallas Brodie, who initially proclaimed that there were no mass graves in Kamloops, went on to give progressively derisive rhetoric about residential schools. One controversial video included her using a “mocking, child-like voice” to belittle former students’ accounts, including testimony about abuse and child sexual abuse.
Canada has undeniably moved from the era when residential schools were openly defended as instruments of “civilization.” But progress should not be mistaken for completion. The Kamloops announcement was confronting in its recency, and the subsequent backlash demonstrates that Canada still struggles to accept its crimes in its entirety.
