I don’t truly know what it
must’ve been like to be at a residential school.
I know about the system
and I’ve heard and read about what the conditions were like. Residential
schools, sponsored by government, had one horrifying mission – to assimilate
Aboriginal children into our Euro-Canadian culture.
The schools operated for
more than a century, from the mid-1880s to the mid-1990s. Children were taken
from their families, from their homes, from their communities and placed into
these awful institutions run by religious orders in collaboration with the
federal government.
These children weren’t
allowed to speak their native languages. They weren’t allowed to practice their
culture.
