Boarding schools (also referred to as Residential schools, and more recently, assimilation camps) were institutions run by the federal government and churches within Canada and the United States with the intention of absorbing Indigenous peoples into dominant Western culture, by displacing them from their culture. Between the late 1800s through the late 1970s, most prominently, Indigenous children were forcibly and violently removed from their families to attend these Residential Schools. There were over 350 schools operating within the United States.
In May 2021, the bodies of 215 children were found in unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. Over the summer, after public outcry led to searching at some of the other 138 residential schools run by Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs, the number of children found in unmarked graves grew to over 6,500.
In the US, there has been no such outcry or search, yet there were at least 332 boarding schools run by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs across 20 states. Schools forced removal of indigenous cultural signifiers, cutting the children’s hair, having them wear American-style uniforms, forbidding them from speaking their indigenous languages, and replacing their tribal names with English-language names.
Canada’s last residential school closed in 1997. In the US, the Indian Child Welfare Act became law in 1978, giving Native American parents the legal right to refuse their child’s placement in a school, however there are still a few dozen off-reservation boarding schools still in operation.
