Residential Schools in Canada: What the System Was, How Long It Ran, and What the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Found

Some stories on this site begin with a single day. This one cannot. It begins with a policy, written down in plain language by the men who built it, and it runs for more than a hundred years. The last school closed in 1996, within the lifetimes of most people reading this page. What follows is built primarily from the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which spent six years gathering the records and the testimony. Where this page states a fact, that is where it comes from.

What the system was

Beginning in the 1880s, the Government of Canada funded a network of residential schools for Indigenous children, operated mostly by Christian churches: Roman Catholic, Anglican, United, and Presbyterian. At its height, the system ran about 80 schools at once. In total, more than 130 residential schools operated in every province and territory except New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. An estimated 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children attended them.

Attendance was not a choice families made. Under the Indian Act, it was compulsory, and enforcement was real: parents who refused could be jailed, and truant officers and the police returned children who ran away. Many children were taken very young, some at four or five years old. Many did not see their families for years at a time. Siblings in the same school were often kept apart, boys from girls, and punished for speaking to each other in their own language.

The purpose was stated openly by the system’s own architects. In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, told a parliamentary committee: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” The Commission’s verdict on that objective, a century later, is quoted in full below.

What the record shows about conditions

The schools were chronically underfunded by design, funded per student at levels far below provincial schools, and the consequences are documented in the government’s own files. Buildings were fire traps and several burned with children inside. Food was inadequate in quantity and quality, and hunger is among the most common memories survivors shared with the Commission. In the early decades, disease moved through crowded, poorly ventilated dormitories with terrible effect. Dr. Peter Bryce, the chief medical officer for Indian Affairs, reported in 1907 that in the schools he surveyed in the West, nearly a quarter of the students had died, most of tuberculosis. His report was sidelined, and he published it himself in 1922 as a pamphlet he titled The Story of a National Crime.

The Commission documented widespread physical and sexual abuse by staff, recorded in survivor testimony, in court cases, and in the churches’ and government’s own records. It also documented the experiments: in the 1940s and 1950s, government scientists conducted nutrition experiments on malnourished children in at least six residential schools, in some cases withholding food and dental care to keep a research baseline, without the consent or knowledge of the children or their parents.

Discipline centred on erasing identity. Children’s hair was cut on arrival. Their clothes were replaced with uniforms. Many were given new names, or numbers. Speaking an Indigenous language, the language spoken at home by their parents and grandparents, was punished. The Commission heard from thousands of survivors about the loneliness of those first nights, and from parents and grandparents, in testimony about the quiet houses the children were taken from.

The children who died

The Commission’s Missing Children and Unmarked Burials work confirmed the deaths of more than 3,200 children in the schools, and its register has continued to grow since, past 4,100 names. The Commission was explicit that the true number is higher and may never be fully known, because records were destroyed, burials were unmarked, and many deaths were never reported to families at all. Parents sometimes learned that a child had died weeks or months later, or not at all. Children were buried at the schools, far from home, in cemeteries that were later neglected, moved, or forgotten.

In the spring of 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced that ground penetrating radar had identified potential unmarked graves in the apple orchard at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Similar announcements from other Nations followed. The announcements did not reveal the schools’ death toll to the survivors and communities who had been describing it for generations. They revealed it to the rest of Canada.

The long ending, and the apology

The system wound down slowly. The federal government took over direct operation of the schools from the churches beginning in 1969, closed most through the 1970s and 1980s, and closed the last one, Gordon’s Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, in 1996.

Survivors organized, testified, and sued. In 2006, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class action settlement in Canadian history, was reached between survivors, the government, and the churches. It included compensation, a healing fund, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself. On June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose in the House of Commons and apologized on behalf of Canada, in the presence of survivors, saying that the policy of assimilation “was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.”

The Commission delivered its final report in 2015, with 94 Calls to Action addressed to governments, churches, schools, and institutions across the country. Its central historical conclusion is one sentence long, and this page will not paraphrase it: “For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”

The legend vs. the record

The softer version of this story, the one many Canadians absorbed growing up, holds that the schools were a well intentioned effort at education that went wrong in places. The record does not support the first part of that sentence. The stated objective, in the words of the officials who ran the system, was assimilation: the elimination of Indigenous peoples as distinct peoples. Underfunding was known and reported while it was happening, by the government’s own medical officer, in writing. Abuse was reported and, in documented cases, known to officials who did not stop it. None of this requires inference. It is in the files.

A second soft version holds that this is ancient history. The last school closed in 1996. Survivors are parents, grandparents, elders, and leaders in every part of this country today, and the Commission documented how the harms carried forward: children raised apart from families grew up without the parenting they themselves had been denied, and the effects move through generations. The record calls that what it is, and so does this page.

What is genuinely contested, and presented here as contested, is the pace and completeness of what followed the apology: how many of the 94 Calls to Action are complete is tracked publicly, and governments, churches, and Indigenous organizations assess that progress differently. Readers can follow the tracking through the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, linked in the sources below.

Why it still matters

On September 30 each year, Canada marks the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, begun in 2021. Orange Shirt Day, which falls on the same date, began with Phyllis Webstad’s account of arriving at residential school at six years old in a new orange shirt her grandmother had bought her, and having it taken away on the first day.

This page exists in this library because the library’s promise is the whole story of the country, in the open, with sources. No account of Canada that skips this chapter is a history. It is a brochure. The sources below are the beginning of the record, not the end of it, and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation holds the testimony itself, in the survivors’ own voices, where it belongs.

Common questions

What was the residential school system in Canada?

Beginning in the 1880s, the Government of Canada funded a network of residential schools for Indigenous children, operated mostly by Christian churches. More than 130 schools ran in total, about 80 at the system's height, in every province and territory except New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. An estimated 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children attended.

How long did the residential school system run?

The system began in the 1880s and wound down slowly over more than a century. The federal government took over direct operation from the churches beginning in 1969 and closed most schools through the 1970s and 1980s. The last school, Gordon's Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, closed in 1996, within the lifetimes of most Canadians living today.

What did the Truth and Reconciliation Commission find?

After six years gathering records and survivor testimony, the Commission concluded in 2015 that residential schools were a central element of a policy it described as cultural genocide, aimed at eliminating Indigenous peoples as distinct peoples. It documented chronic underfunding, widespread physical and sexual abuse, and confirmed the deaths of more than 3,200 children, a register that has since passed 4,100 names.

What are the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action?

The Commission's 2015 final report included 94 Calls to Action addressed to governments, churches, schools, and institutions across the country. They followed the 2006 Settlement Agreement and the federal apology of June 11, 2008. How many of the 94 are complete is tracked publicly, and governments, churches, and Indigenous organizations assess that progress differently.