In Canada, the Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs
and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created
for the purpose of removing Indigenous children from the influence of
their own culture and assimilating
them into the dominant Canadian culture, “to kill the indian in the
child.” Over the course of the system’s more than hundred-year
existence, about 30 per cent of Indigenous children (around 150,000)
were placed in residential schools nationally. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to an
incomplete historical record, though estimates range from 3,200 upwards
of 6,000.