Government of Canada (Department of Indian Affairs)

For more than a century, the Government of Canada — acting principally through its Department of Indian Affairs under the authority of the Indian Act — funded and administered a system of residential schools for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children, operated day to day by the Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian churches. Roughly 150,000 children passed through the system, many removed from their families and communities under legal compulsion; the last federally supported school closed in 1996.

Role in Documented Cases

The department’s role in this system is the subject of this archive’s file on Canadian Residential Schools. Government policy explicitly aimed to sever children from their languages, families, and cultural practices, and survivor testimony gathered over decades has documented widespread physical and sexual abuse at many institutions, along with elevated childhood mortality at some schools. Attendance was compulsory under federal regulation for much of the system’s history, and Indian Affairs officials, rather than the churches alone, set the funding levels, curricula, and inspection regimes that governed conditions inside the schools.

Accountability

The 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history at the time, established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which operated from 2008 to 2015 and gathered testimony from thousands of survivors. Its final report characterized the residential school system as amounting to “cultural genocide.” Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a formal apology in the House of Commons on June 11, 2008, on behalf of the Government of Canada. In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that a ground-penetrating radar survey had identified what were reported as approximately 215 probable unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, prompting further searches at numerous other former school sites and renewed national and international attention to the system’s legacy. The federal government has since committed additional funding for locating and documenting burial sites, though the department’s successor agencies continue to face criticism from Indigenous communities and the Commission’s own reporting over the pace of implementing the Commission’s 94 Calls to Action.

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