The underlying goal of those institutions was not education. It was ending Indigeneity as an identity. Officially, Canada’s objective for the schools was to “kill the Indian in the child”—to sever all connections between Indigenous peoples and their land-based traditions, ceremonies, languages, and kinship relations. Sometimes this is attributed exclusively to racism, but that is only half the story: the white and Christian supremacy that underpinned the residential school system also served national economic and political interests. Canada, which began as a cluster of fur-trading companies and other extractive industries, needed those schools because its hunger for land was voracious, and those severed connections—the uprooted and traumatized relationships between parents and children, between land and people—helped make it possible to seize unceded Indigenous land for unfettered resource extraction and settlement by colonists.

QUESTION: The economic rationale underlying assimilation is often understated — worth probing how land hunger drove policy beyond expressed racism.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 845