Residential School System In The 1950's

The end goal of the residential school system was complete assimilation of the Indigenous cultures, but by the 1950’s, it was quite clear that the system had not worked. Indigenous cultures survived and continued on, despite all the efforts to destroy them and all the harm and damage that was done (Hanson, 2009, ¶ 9). The suffering of the children and the effects of the residential school system began to become more widely recognized. Finally, the government realized that taking children away from their homes, families, and communities was extremely detrimental to their health. In 1951 with amendments made to the Indian Act, it was finally decided that the half day work/school system would no longer exist (Hanson, 2009, ¶ 9). But, this was

As these changed were being made, the government decided that it was time to stop the segregation between the Indigenous people and the rest of Canadian society. Indigenous children were allowed to attend public school. This was a major step, but the students still struggled. Many of the students struggled with the adjustment to the Eurocentric society at their hands, and they also faced discrimination and were often bullied by the rest of the students at the schools. Post secondary education was still out of the question for Indigenous students, and those who wished to attend University or College were discouraged and sometimes not allowed to do so (Hanson, 2009, ¶ 11). It took years, but as the segregation between the Indigenous and the rest of Canada’s society continued to vanish, so did the residential schools. The majority of the schools closed from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. The final residential school to close in Canada was Gordon Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan in 1996 (Hanson, 2009, ¶

Not only did the students experience emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, the mental trauma that comes along with those experiences last a lifetime. To help cope with what the Indigenous people had gone through, turning to substance abuse was one of the ways that a majority of the Indigenous population turned to (Mcquaid et al. 2017, 424). According to Statistics Canada in 2015, about forty percent of Indigenous people who between the ages of 12 to 24 drank heavily every day, and about thirty five percent of Indigenous people who are aged 25 to 44 drank heavily every day. Mass trauma is what the Indigenous cultures endured, and according to Elias, B et al. (2012), there is a direct correlation between historical trauma, such as the residential schools, and intergenerational trauma and grief, such as having parents, grandparents, or caretakers who attended the schools and experiencing their trauma through them, and higher suicide and mental illness rates. The majority of the Indigenous populations of Canada live on reserves and live in poverty. The living conditions on the reserves are atrocious, many of them do not have schools, and the one’s that do do not enforce regular attendance. It is almost as though the condition for Indigenous people have not gotten better from the times of the residential schools (Bombay et al. 2013, 331). Since the last