The research question I am endeavoring to answer in my paper is, what impacts did religion and its residential schools have on indigenous children and their childhoods. I want to explore the influence of residential schools on indigenous children, during 1940-1993 within British Columbia, and how the schools were used to segregate indigenous children from their culture and denounce their identity as indigenous people. The education that indigenous children received at residential schools was based off a foreign religion with the purpose to ensure that children were isolated from their social and cultural background. It is said that children were being taken from their homes and sent to residential schools with mixed intentions. Some parents and children had the impression that attended residential school would be give an opportunity for a higher education, this was not the reality they would soon come to terms with. Children were being forced to live a life that they were unfamiliar with while being physically, mentally and emotionally mistreated. I will be using primary resources and secondary sources that outline these aspects of religion and its residential schools to support my argument of how they impacted indigenous identity and childhoods.

 

Header Image is titled: New classroom building at Kamloops Indian Residential School, Kamloops, British Columbia, ca. 1950

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