Residential schooling in northern Canada was, at most times and places, not a segregated system but part of a system of public education. And yet, like the better-known segregated systems in southern Canada, these schools disrupted the intergenerational transmission of values and skills and imparted few if any of the skills needed for employment.
There were a number of unique elements to the northern experience. Perhaps one of the most unusual was the number of former residential school students who served in the legislature of the Northwest Territories. These former students, some of whom served as cabinet ministers, mounted a direct challenge to the thinking of education officials. They clearly identified the system’s failings and proposed remedies that were distinctly northern.
The harm done by residential schooling in the North remains. The students who were adults in Akaitcho Hall in 1975 may well have been the same young men and women who were disoriented, bullied, and abused as children in the large hostels in the mid-1960s. Although some were not abused or treated roughly themselves, they all lived in a milieu where abuse, whether in the classroom or the hostel, was all too common. When they returned to their communities, they were estranged from their parents, their language, and their culture. Many of their parents, the generation still in a state of shock from the upheavals of the 1940s through the 1960s, could not knit their communities back together again. The removal of children added to the damage already done by other economic and demographic changes. And jobs—which were the main inducement to parents to give up their young people—generally failed to materialize. But despite these hardships, many Survivors found the courage and the energy to begin to pull their lives and their communities back together.