Canada operated a national system of church-run residential schools for Indigenous children under federal funding and authority; 139 institutions are formally recognised and at least 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended between 1883 and the closure of the last school in 1996. Attendance was compelled by law and administrative pressure, children were separated from parents for most of the year, punished for speaking their languages, and set to work under a half-day labour system, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recorded extensive physical and sexual abuse. The TRC concluded in 2015 that the schools were 'an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide'. Mortality was severe: the commission identified thousands of student deaths, largely from tuberculosis and influenza, and found the burial places of many children unmarked or unknown, a finding that gained wider attention after ground-penetrating radar surveys at former school sites from 2021. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2007 produced $2.8 billion in compensation for 31,970 resolved abuse claims, a 2008 prime ministerial apology and the TRC's 94 Calls to Action. This entry covers the post-1945 portion of a system that began in the 1880s.
The Canadian government and church bodies removed First Nations, Inuit and Métis children from their families and held them in residential institutions
The 1951 census of Canada counted roughly 165,000 Indigenous people — about 156,000 registered Indians and about 10,000 Inuit — with Métis largely uncounted; by the 2021 census 1.8 million people identified as Indigenous. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's figure of about 150,000 children covers the whole life of the residential school system from the 1880s to 1996, not the 1945-96 window alone.
The low figure is the number of student deaths the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was able to document in its named and unnamed registers from surviving records; the high figure is the estimate given by commission chair Murray Sinclair, who judged the documented count a floor because attendance and death records were incomplete or destroyed. The gap is driven by record loss rather than by disagreement over what happened. CBC reports the TRC calculated a student mortality rate of roughly one in twenty-five across the system's life, with mortality far higher in the pre-1940 decades than in the period covered by this entry.
All four forms were documented by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which recorded compulsory removal of children, suppression of Indigenous languages and ceremony, sexual and physical abuse resulting in 31,970 resolved compensation claims, and the half-day labour system operated in the schools.
Canada