In Canada, the Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. Attendance was mandatory from 1894 to 1947. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own native culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s about 30 percent of Indigenous children were believed to be attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000.
CBC News is the division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation responsible for the news gathering and production of news programs on the corporation's English-language operations, namely CBC Television, CBC Radio, CBC News Network, and CBC.ca. Founded in 1941, CBC News is the largest news broadcaster in Canada and has local, regional, and national broadcasts and stations. It frequently collaborates with its French-language counterpart, Radio-Canada Info, though the two are organizationally separate. The CBC follows the Journalistic Standards and Practices which provides the policy framework within which CBC journalism seeks to meet the expectations and obligations it faces from the public.
Shelagh Rogers, OC, is a Canadian broadcast journalist based in British Columbia. She is the host and producer of CBC Radio One's The Next Chapter, and former chancellor of the University of Victoria.
The Sisters of Charity of Montreal, formerly called The Sisters of Charity of the Hôpital Général of Montreal and more commonly known as the Grey Nuns of Montreal, is a Canadian religious institute of Roman Catholic religious sisters, founded in 1737 by Marguerite d'Youville, a young widow.
Nellie Cournoyea is a Canadian politician, who served as the sixth premier of the Northwest Territories from 1991 to 1995. She was the first female premier of a Canadian territory and the second female premier in Canadian history after Rita Johnston of British Columbia.
Calvin Murray Sinclair, is a former member of the Canadian Senate and First Nations lawyer who served as chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 2009 to 2015. He previously served as a judge in Manitoba from 1988 to 2009, being the first Indigenous judge appointed in the province. Sinclair was appointed to the Senate of Canada on April 2, 2016. In November 2020, he announced his retirement from the Senate effective January 31, 2021.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada was a truth and reconciliation commission active in Canada from 2008 to 2015, organized by the parties of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.
Peter Henderson Bryce was a public health physician for the Ontario provincial and Canadian federal governments. As a public official he submitted reports that highlighted the mistreatment of Indigenous students in the Canadian Indian residential school system and advocated for the improvement of environmental conditions at the schools. He also worked on the health of immigrant populations in Canada.
The Sixties Scoop was a period in which a series of policies were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up," Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families. Despite its name referencing the 1960s, the Sixties Scoop began in the mid-to-late 1950s and persisted into the 1980s.
The history of the First Nations is the prehistory and history of present-day Canada's peoples from the earliest times to the present day with a focus on the First Nations. The pre-history settlement of the Americas is a subject of ongoing debate because First Nations oral history, combined with new methodologies and technologies which are used by archaeologists, linguists, and other researchers, produce—new and sometimes conflicting—evidence. The 1996 Report by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People described four stages in Canadian history that overlap and occur at different times in different regions: 1) Pre-contact – Different Worlds – Contact; 2) Early Colonies (1500–1763); 3) Displacement and Assimilation (1764–1969); and 4) Renewal to Constitutional Entrenchment (2018).
The First Nations nutrition experiments were a series of experiments run in Canada by Department of Pensions and National Health in the 1940s and 1950s. The experiments were conducted on at least 1,300 Indigenous people across Canada, approximately 1,000 of whom were children. The deaths connected with the experiments have been described as part of Canada's genocide of Indigenous peoples.
The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement is an agreement between the government of Canada and approximately 86,000 Indigenous peoples in Canada who at some point were enrolled as children in the Canadian Indian residential school system, a system which was in place between 1879 and 1997. The IRSSA recognized the damage inflicted by the residential schools and established a C$1.9-billion compensation package called CEP for all former IRS students. The agreement, announced in 2006, was the largest class action settlement in Canadian history.
Shingwauk Indian Residential School was a Canadian residential school for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children that operated in Canada between 1873 to 1970 in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, by the Anglican Church of Canada and the Government of Canada.
Janice Forsyth is a Canadian associate professor of Sociology and the director of the Indigenous Studies program at Western University in London, Ontario. A former varsity athlete Forsyth was awarded the Tom Longboat Regional Award for Ontario in 2002.
The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, colloquially known as Orange Shirt Day, is a Canadian statutory holiday to recognize the legacy of the Canadian Indian residential school system.
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is the archival repository for all of the material collected by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, purposed to compile the complete history and legacy of Canada's residential school system.
Melanie Delva is the Reconciliation Animator for the Anglican Church of Canada.
Throughout its history, the Canadian Indian residential school system saw many deaths. The number of school-related deaths, mostly from tuberculosis, remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 6,000. Comparatively few cemeteries associated with residential schools are explicitly referenced in surviving documents, however the age and duration of the schools suggests that most had a cemetery associated with them. Most cemeteries were unregistered, and as such the locations of many burial sites of residential school children have been lost. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has called for "the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried."
A statue of Egerton Ryerson by Hamilton MacCarthy was installed on the grounds of Ryerson University in Toronto, now known as Toronto Metropolitan University, until 2021.
The Calgary Peace Prize is an annual Canadian award that is given by Mount Royal University.
