Residential Schools and Their Impact on Families
Residential Schools and Their Impact on Families
Native Studies 10, Unit 2, Lesson 8
Native Studies 10, Unit 2, Lesson 8
Learning Goal: I can describe the impact of residential schools on Indigenous families and explain the cross-generational effects that continue today.
This handout deals with residential schools, including abuse, death, and the loss of language and culture. Some of this may be personal for you or someone in your family or community. You do not have to share anything you are not ready to share in this course. If you need to step away and come back to this later, that is okay. Your teacher checks in with you daily, so reach out if you need support.
24 hour National Indian Residential School Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419
Residential schools were government funded, church operated institutions built to remove Indigenous children from their families and assimilate them into European Canadian society. The system ran for more than 150 years, and the last school did not close until 1996, within living memory for many people reading this. What happened in these schools did not stay inside their walls. It shaped families, communities, and nations, and its effects continue today.
The first church-run residential school opened in 1831. For decades it operated alongside other church and mission schools without a single national policy behind it. That changed in the 1880s, when the federal government adopted an official policy of funding residential schools across the country, turning a patchwork of church schools into a coordinated national system. In 1920, the Indian Act made attendance compulsory for Treaty-status First Nations children between the ages of 7 and 15, backed by law and enforced by Indian agents and police. The system continued for most of the twentieth century. The last federally funded residential school, Gordon Indian Residential School in Punnichy, Saskatchewan, closed in 1996.
More than 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children attended residential schools over the life of the system. Many never returned home.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada spent years documenting the residential school system, hearing directly from Survivors, families, and communities. In its final report, the TRC concluded that the system was, in its own words, a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples. The TRC called this cultural genocide. That is not a term used loosely here. It is the formal conclusion of a national commission after five years of testimony and research.
Children were forbidden to speak their languages. Ceremonies were banned. Family visits were restricted or denied. Children who showed anything of their cultural identity, a word in their own language, a braid, a story from home, faced punishment. The goal, stated plainly by the government officials who built the system, was to separate children from everything that made them who they were.
Residential schools were chronically underfunded and overcrowded. The quality of education was substandard, and staff were rarely held accountable for how they treated the children in their care. Disease spread easily in crowded, poorly maintained buildings, and death rates at some schools were high. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation states plainly that thousands of students suffered physical and sexual abuse in these schools. This handout will not describe specific incidents. What matters for this lesson is that the abuse was widespread, that it was enabled by a lack of oversight and accountability, and that it happened to children as young as five and six years old, far from their families, with nowhere to turn.
The damage did not end when a student left the school, and it did not end when the last school closed in 1996. Many Survivors were never shown love or stability inside these institutions and had no model for parenting when they became parents themselves. Languages that were beaten out of one generation were never passed to the next. Ceremonies and cultural knowledge that depended on unbroken transmission from Elders to children lost links in that chain. Researchers call the resulting pattern of grief, disrupted parenting, addiction, and family struggle intergenerational trauma. It is not a weakness in any family or community. It is the traceable, documented consequence of a deliberate government policy that ran for over a century.
Survivors carried these stories for decades, often in silence, before a growing number came forward starting in the 1990s. Their persistence led to the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, which included a formal Statement of Apology delivered by Prime Minister Stephen Harper on June 11, 2008, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The TRC gathered testimony from Survivors, families, and communities across the country from 2008 to 2015, when it released its final report along with 94 Calls to Action addressed to governments, churches, schools, and all Canadians.
The TRC's records now live permanently at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg. In 2021, Canada marked its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation on September 30, a direct response to one of the TRC's own Calls to Action.
None of this undoes what happened. But Survivors, families, and nations have led their own work of healing, language reclamation, and cultural resurgence long before any government commission and long after. Lesson 9 picks up that thread directly.
Residential school: a government funded, church operated institution that Indigenous children were required or forced to attend, built to separate them from their families and assimilate them into settler Canadian society.
Assimilation: a policy or process aimed at eliminating a group's distinct culture, language, and identity by absorbing them into another culture.
Cultural genocide: the TRC's formal term for the residential school system's intent and effect, the deliberate destruction of a people's culture, language, and identity as a distinct group.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC): the national commission, active from 2008 to 2015, that documented the history and impact of residential schools through Survivor testimony and research.
Intergenerational trauma: the transmission of the effects of trauma from one generation to the next, even to family members who did not directly experience the original event.
Calls to Action: the 94 recommendations issued by the TRC in 2015, directed at governments, churches, schools, and Canadians, aimed at redressing the legacy of residential schools and advancing reconciliation.
Residential schools operated for more than 150 years, from 1831 to 1996, and were built with the explicit intent to assimilate Indigenous children and separate them from their families, languages, and cultures.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission formally concluded this was cultural genocide, based on five years of testimony and research.
The effects of residential schools did not end when the schools closed. They continue today as intergenerational trauma, passed through families and communities.
Survivors' persistence led to a national apology, the TRC, the 94 Calls to Action, and an ongoing, unfinished process of reconciliation.
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, "Residential School History." https://nctr.ca/education/residential-school-history/
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 94 Calls to Action (PDF). https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf
Historica Canada, "Residential Schools in Canada: A Timeline." https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/educational-videos/timeline-videos/residential-schools-in-canada-a-timeline
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. (2026). Residential School History. https://nctr.ca/education/residential-school-history/
National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. (2026). Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. https://nctr.ca/about/truth-and-reconciliation-commission-of-canada/
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report. TRC.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Calls to Action. https://ehprnh2mwo3.exactdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf
Historica Canada. (2023). Residential Schools in Canada: A Timeline. https://www.historicacanada.ca/productions/educational-videos/timeline-videos/residential-schools-in-canada-a-timeline