NOW Magazine
How many Indigenous children died in Canada’s residential schools?
The official death toll is 3,213, but there was no policy for the burial of children until seven decades after the schools were first established By Enzo DiMatteo
Many Canadians are unaware of our history of residential schools.
How many more? The discovery of the remains of 215 children at the former site of an Indian residential school in Kamloops, BC, has woken Canadians up to the horrors of a mostly neglected part of the country’s history.
But it’s just the beginning.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) report into Canada’s residential school system estimates that some 6,000 Indigenous children taken from their families as part of the government’s inculturation policies following confederation may have died in the 150 residential schools run by the Catholic and Anglican churches from the 1880s to as late as 1996.