Kill the Indian, Save the Child

Genocide is the word Pope Francis used on July 20, 2022, to describe the 150-year history of Canada's involvement in the Residential Boarding School System. Modeled after the Carlisle Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which closed in 1918 due to substandard evaluations, residential schools in Canada continued to expand, reaching their summit of eighty schools in 1930, years after similar industrial schools in the United States were implementing day schools on reservations.

Residential schools in Canada, originally conceived by governmental officials and religious leaders as an efficient way to assimilate Indigenous children into civilized society, were a national failure in both their secular goals and attempts to convert conscripted enrollees to Christendom. During their existence in Canada, an estimated 150,000 indigenous children were deployed to government-funded schools; an estimated six thousand children died while in the custody of educators who imposed a militaristic lifestyle as an effective vehicle of transformation.

This narrative is a work of historical fiction, following the reactive lifestyles of First Nations people forced to adjust their existence to meet governmental regulations regarding land ownership and children's education. Immersed in the concept of "Manifest Destiny," pioneers from Europe continued to impose a foreign existence on local inhabitants who had, for centuries, demonstrated their ability to subsist and survive with nature's provisions. History records a solution of compromise, where both groups achieved harmony through coexistence.