Return of the Indian Residential Schools

In the years following the successful campaign by the National Indian Brotherhood for ‘Indian Control of Indian Education’, the winding down of the Indian residential school system continued. No longer at the fore of indigenous-Canada relations, its meaning remained clouded in ambiguity. If anything, the residential schools seemed destined to represent but another example of the maltreatment of indigenous communities in Canada. However, this was not to be so. In the second half of the 1980s, the residential schools were suddenly returned to the foreground of indigenous-Canada relations.