Canada’s Indian Residential Schools Legacy

were removed, often forcibly, from their homes and placed in Indian Residential Schools, where they were compelled to abandon their Native languages, culture, and religion on account of both physical and psychological abuse.1 At present, the government of Canada is making attempts to remedy this dar...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Larissa Fulop
Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
Format: Text
Language:English
Subjects:
Online Access:http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.672.2321
http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article%3D1030%26context%3Dundergradtjr
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Summary:were removed, often forcibly, from their homes and placed in Indian Residential Schools, where they were compelled to abandon their Native languages, culture, and religion on account of both physical and psychological abuse.1 At present, the government of Canada is making attempts to remedy this dark chapter of its history by providing survivors with various forms of reparations so as to promote reconciliation throughout Canadian society at large. As Antonio Buti reminds us, “the right to reparations for wrongful acts has long been recognized as a fundamental principle of law essential to the functioning of legal systems.”2 As will become evident in this paper, reparations made according to a state-run, top down approaches is untenable. Reparations for harms suffered by First Nations children, their families, and communities under Canada’s Indian Residential Schools system illustrates a case of transitional justice mechanisms as work in a de facto non-transitional context.3