ShortHand: Canada’s Residential School System

Between 1828 and 1997, over 150,000 indigenous Canadian children were forcibly taken from their families, and placed in church-run ‘residential schools’.  Their heads were shaved, they were forbidden from speaking their native languages, and their cultures were forcibly and violently suppressed. This is the story of one of the darkest chapters in Canada’s colonial history, and the cultural genocide of the country’s indigenous peoples.