Establishment & Eventual Closure
The
intent of the residential school system was to educate, assimilate, and
integrate Aboriginal people into European-Canadian society. In the words of one
government official, it was a system designed ‘to kill the Indian in the
child.’
The earliest was the Mohawk Indian Residential School, opened in
1831 at Brantford, Ontario. The schools existed in almost all provinces and
territories. In the North, the residential school system also took the form of
hostels and tent camps.
The federal government currently recognizes that 132 federally-supported residential schools existed across Canada. This number does not recognize those residential schools that were administered by provincial/territorial governments and churches. At its peak in the early 1930s, it was a state-sponsored, church-run network of 80 schools with an enrolment of over 17,000.
In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, the bureaucrat in charge of
Canada’s Indian Policy, revised the Indian Act to make attendance at
residential school mandatory for all children up to age 15.
Very gradually, the Residential School System was discarded in
favour of a policy of integration. Aboriginal students began in the 1940s to
attend mainstream schools.
The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development assumed
full management of the residential school system on April 1, 1969.
Throughout the 1970s, at the request of the National Indian
Brotherhood, federal government undertook a process that saw the eventual
transfer of education management to Aboriginal people.
In 1970, Blue
Quills Residential School became the first residential school managed by
Aboriginal people. The last federally-administered residential school closed in
1996.
