The Canadian Government and Industrial Schools

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In the late 1800s, the Canadian government and the church bodies started removing aboriginal children from their homes and started replacing them in industrial schools. The residential schools were the most effective take for destroying aboriginal culture and identity. Many of the Aboriginal children came away from school in their teen year’s barely knowing how to read and write. Thus, what was more critical was that many children were abused emotionally and physically throughout their school years. More importantly, the schools were located far away because the federal government wanted to minimize the amount of parent-child contact. The severity of the abuse suffered in residential schools intended to kill the Indian children within, which resulted in Aboriginal children suffering after they were done residential schools. There are many factors on how the aboriginal children lost their relationship with families, identity and culture because of residential schools. Additionally, almost one third of the aboriginal children from the ages 6-15 went to residential schools and they were often sent away from their communities approximately 10 months out of the year. This left the aboriginal children away from their home, which had a heartbreaking effect on their parents. Therefore, there was an increased alcohol consumption on the parents because they thought they were not needed by their children; as well, the children blamed their parents for sending them to schools. The alcohol was used to help the feeling of guilt for the parents. Secondly, the aboriginal children were treated as slaves; they had no identity. “Upon arriving at residential school, some children were given severe haircuts and issued with numbers that used to iden... ... middle of paper ... ...after school would grow up and sexually abuse younger kids; therefore they were being perpetrators and they would go back. In conclusion, the residential schools were a way of assimilating Aboriginals to the English culture. This assimilation caused the Aboriginal to experience great hardships as they were separated from their family, tortured physically and mentally, and enforced to follow a culture that had no similarity to their Aboriginal way of life. In fact, the true meaning of the residential schools is shown in the way the Aboriginals were transformed; the schools truly killed the Indian within them. Furthermore, the minority group of the Aboriginals experienced adversity unlike any other group in society, and therefore nowadays, they deserve to have rights given to them by the government so that they can recollect their Aboriginal culture and identity.

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