Residential schools were first being established in the 1940s and the last one was finally closed in 1996. In these residential schools, First Nations people were very badly treated and one who went to those schools would not get a proper education. The students who went to those schools would still be affected by it and effects from them are showing still to this day. Why did the Canadian government create residential schools in the first place? Well, the most obvious reason was to educate First Nations people to educate them in modern Euro-Canadian ways. Another reason and one of the main ones was to remove their Indian status .The other reason was to Christianize aboriginal people. In this essay, you will learn the three main reasons …show more content…
Aboriginal people taught their children the Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) about the area they lived in and how to live off the land. They also taught important morals through fictional stories they made. The First Nations people taught everything orally. They had no form of writing. Most people at the time thought of the First Nations as primitive for their nomadic lifestyle and way the First nations were taught. In the residential schools, students would be taught how to read as well and write in English and/or French because you needed to know how to do so if you wanted to communicate with white people. Learning to read/write would also help you do jobs and help you learn skills. Many people believed that the First Nation’s living off the land had to be changed and so schools also wanted the schools to teach them how to farm. As well as all this, the First Nations had asked the Canadian government for schools so they could get an education since their way of life was being lost. The buffalo were reaching critically low levels and could only live on small isolated reserves. The residential schools had been built so that Indians (First Nations) could be educated and fit into Euro-Canadian …show more content…
Whether you have Indian status or not defines whether you are Indian or not. It also provides them with special Indian rights. The government Did not like the Indians and wanted to remove their special rights such as reserves. To do this they made a rule that you could give up your status for citizenship rights. They disallowed Indians from getting particularly important jobs such as a doctor or lawyer or get a university degree without losing their status. The government at first made it optional to get enfranchised but after several years they only got 1 person who voluntarily was enfranchised. When the Indians asked for schools to get their children an education, the government saw it as a way to end Indian Status completely. They became able to remove their status by sending them into the residential schools and removing from them what makes them and