Who We Are: Four Questions for a Life and a Nation

Residential Schools in Canada: From Cultural Genocide to Calls for Action

The roots of residential schools in what is now Canada stretch back centuries: In the mid‑1800s, religious organizations—Catholic, Anglican, Methodist and others—were educating Indigenous children in mission schools; by the 1880s, with the Indian Act (1876) and other legislation, the federal government took on a stronger role, funding and administering a system aimed at assimilating Indigenous children, erasing their languages, cultures, spiritual practices, and connections to family.

As the system expanded, attendance became compulsory in many places, children were often removed from their homes (sometimes forcibly), and decay in oversight—underfunding, neglect, abuse—became widespread.

Murray Sinclair, as Chair of the TRC, helped bring this history into sharper, more public view. Under his leadership, the TRC gathered thousands of survivor testimonies, reviewed archival records, and ultimately concluded in its 2015 report that Canada’s residential school system was not simply misguided policy or tragic mistake—but rather, what he called a period of “cultural genocide.”

Through Sinclair’s work, key facts became more widely known: that at least 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children were enrolled over more than a century; that thousands never returned home—many buried in unmarked graves; that many survivors continue to experience intergenerational trauma linked to the physical, emotional, sexual abuses and systemic cultural erasure they endured.

Today the legacy of residential schools is both a memory and a living reality. The harms—loss of language, cultural dislocation, broken familial connections, psychological trauma—are being addressed through the 94 Calls to Action of the TRC, Indigenous‑led healing, new memorialization, national apology(s), and legal settlements. Yet many believe much work remains. Sinclair repeatedly has insisted that reconciliation cannot just be about apology—“Canada must move from apology to action.”