'Simply a savage': How the residential schools came to be

WINNIPEG – It was a failed social experiment stretching back to Sir John A. Macdonald that set the groundwork for decades of human misery.

The Canadian government, in line with a goal eventually described as a plan to “kill the Indian in the child,” established a system of Indian residential schools.

It began in 1883, when Macdonald passed a cabinet measure to create three residential schools in the West to be operated by the Catholic and Anglican churches.

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