How were these boarding schools established, which we now have to talk about again after the discovery of children’s graves?
One had a social Darwinist view that indigenous peoples are dying who must be civilized and saved. They were taken to reservations where they were to be assimilated and Christianized. The Indian Act of 1876 stipulated that children should be placed in boarding schools or day schools to educate, convert and assimilate. The Canadian state has established 139 such “residential schools” for this purpose. By the time the last school closed in 1996, 150,000 children had been sent to these schools.
Learning to read and write English and French as well?
Without this. Indigenous children were no longer allowed to speak their own language. Their hair was cut, they were forcibly dressed in western clothes. They actually made copies of Western ones. But they did not want to attract the intellectual elite here; They needed farmers, factory workers and maids. an underclass. This was also conveyed in schools, where children sometimes had to work hard.
What did churches have to do with schools?
They needed staff for these schools. Missionaries from the Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and Catholic churches introduced themselves. However, they were established, conceived, legalized and financed by the state of Canada. But the clergy were not teachers, many not trained for the job. Some were completely overwhelmed. Diseases came, children died in heaps.
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