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While the discovery of 215 children’s graves at the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School have galvanized Canadian public opinion, the horrors of the Canadian Indian Residential School system were never a secret. Generations of Ottawa administrators were fully aware of the system’s deadly reputation, and while polite society at the time may have balked at the occasional story of abuse or mass-death, they largely endorsed the system’s central mission of forcibly assimilating Indigenous children.
In archives, filing cabinets and desk drawers across Canada lie the paper trail of Indian Residential Schools: How abuse was overlooked, how neglect was institutionalized and how state coercion was used to take children from their families. Below, a gallery of primary documents showing how the crimes of residential schools looked to the people who saw, experienced and perpetrated them firsthand.