Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada now identifies 136 institutions as former Indian Residential Schools that were established exclusively for Aboriginal children by the federal government in partnership with the country’s four major churches.

Beginning in the 1880s, Aboriginal children across Canada were removed, often forcibly, from their homes and placed in Indian Residential Schools. At the schools, students were forbidden to speak Native languages and practice their culture. Testimony from surviving former students presents overwhelming evidence of widespread neglect, starvation, extensive physical and sexual abuse, and many student deaths related to these crimes. As is so often the case with state-inflicted mass atrocities, records indicating accurate rates of abuse and death at residential schools do not exist or were destroyed. Until existing estimates can be substantiated with research, we only have survivor testimony to rely on. These estimates suggest that sexual abuse rates were as high as 75 percent in some schools, and rates of physical harms were higher still. If this number is even close to the total, the scale of violent crime against children at the schools is staggering. On another level, searching for a precise number for rates of abuse at the schools is beside the point. The larger crime is that these schools were designed and operated by the church and state with the purpose of destroying Native cultures and communities in every corner of Canada. This crime has caused incalculable harm, not the least of which was allowing—even encouraging—the abuse mentioned above. But for most Canadians, the experiences of the generations of Aboriginal people who attended residential schools have remained a silent chapter of history until now.

The stories of the children who never returned home from residential schools must be remembered and honoured,

Canada's ongoing shame in the face of these findings,

An estimated 6,000 children died at residential schools