Aboriginal Residential School System

Since the ending of the residential school system, the aboriginal community(including First Nations, Inuit and Metis) of Canada has suffered negatively. The main goal of the residential school system was to integrate aboriginal children into the euro-canadian society by forcing them to only speak English and teaching them how a typical Canadian child behaves. If the child had difficulty conforming or did not obey their teachers, they would be physically and verbally abused. At most schools, aboriginal children were subjected to sexual abuse and assault by their authority as well. Despite these schools being closed for decades, the effects of being in them still linger to today. Yet, not much has been done by the Canadian Federal government

The author’s research questions were “What are the reasons why aboriginal culture is close to eradication?(Fontaine, 2017)” And “How can we preserve the culture?(Fontaine,2017) Although the overall experience of being apart of a residential school is not the main focus of the article, the author spoke to various survivors of the system about their experiences. The author found that “the erosion of indigenous languages continues to occur in the provincial school system today”(Fontaine,2017) as learning about aboriginal culture is practically excluded from many Canadian provinces curriculums and being taught aboriginal languages is a rare occurance. Another reason of the eradication of aboriginal language and culture is that since the residential school system forced children to speak English and conform to euro-canadian culture at all times, barely any survivors retained their original language, leading many to not teach indigenous languages to their children. To preserve the culture, the author suggests that there needs to be changes in the

The article begins by stating that “attempts at resolution between former students of indian residential schools and the non-aboriginal Canadian population began with the signing of the indian residential schools settlement agreement in 2006(Carr, Chartier and Dadgostari,2017).” However, the authors still believe that the aftermath of the residential schools are still virtually unknown and unacknowledged to the public. For the article, the authors asked “what are the mental effects of being in a residential school system(Carr, Chartier and Dadgostari,2017)?” and “what should be done to help the survivors(Carr, Chartier and Dadgostari,2017)?” In order to gather information, they interviewed 10 people of aboriginal descent that either survived or had a family member who went to a residential school. They found that many residential school survivors that were abused physically, verbally and sexually will treat their children the same way they were, and that this leads to their children being more prone to depression than children of aboriginal people who did not attend residential schools. They also mention that many of the stories they heard from the survivors they interviewed had related