Canada's Residential Schools: The Inuit and Northern Experience

This Volume 2 of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The history of residential schooling in the North has been divided into two sections. The first deals with the era before 1960, a period best described as the missionary era. It starts with an overview of Canadian government policy in the North, followed by a survey of missionary activity and northern residential schooling in the nineteenth century, and by two chapters on the era of the mission schools in the Northwest Territories. The first of these chapters is a chronological and thematic history; the second draws on a number of memoirs written by former students to capture a sense of life in the schools. A thematic and chronological history of the schools in the Yukon follows. The decline of the missionary schools overlapped with the assertion of federal authority in the North after 1950. For that reason, the second section of this report deals with the history of residential schooling in the North after 1950, which parallels the evolution of democratic governance in northern Canada, the historical redrawing of the map of Canada to create a new territory of Nunavut, and the essential participation of many northern residential school Survivors in that evolution as they assumed important roles in running the governments they had previously criticized, and then went on to influence and redesign. These same Survivors have been at the vanguard of educational reforms in recent years and are now ensuring that all northern students, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, are learning about northern Aboriginal history, including the Treaties and the residential school era, as part of their mandatory core curriculum. Through their example, they are influencing and challenging the rest of Canada to do the same.