# Canadian Indian Residential Schools The **Canadian Indian Residential Schools** were a government-funded, largely church-run system of boarding schools that, from the 1880s until the last closures in 1996, removed roughly 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children from their families to forcibly assimilate them — suppressing Indigenous languages and cultures amid widespread neglect and abuse. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which reported in 2015, documented the system in detail and characterized it as "cultural genocide," and in 2021 the announced detection of probable unmarked graves at former school sites brought renewed national attention. The schools are included in the [[Canadian History Hub]] because the reckoning over them has become contested culture-war terrain: the terrain on which Canada's debates over national guilt, "wokeness," statue removals, and the limits of historical apology are fought — the Canadian counterpart to the American argument over how the nation's founding sins should be taught. It anchors the present-tense reckoning thread. > [!note] Stub > Phase 1 spine stub. Expand: the policy origins and Davin Report, the role of the churches, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's findings and Calls to Action, the 2021 unmarked-graves coverage and the disputes that followed.