For additional resources related to residential schools, visit the Orange Shirt Day and IST: Indigenous Studies Residential Schools guides.
Between 1867 and 2000, the Canadian government sent over 150,000 Aboriginal children to residential schools across the country. Government officials and missionaries agreed that in order to “civilize and Christianize” Aboriginal children, it was necessary to separate them from their parents and their home communities. For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien. Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers. This report is the first systematic effort to record and analyze deaths at the schools, and the presence and condition of student cemeteries, within the regulatory context in which the schools were intended to operate.
J. R. Miller, 2017 (e-book)
Residential Schools and Reconciliation tackles and explains institutional responses to Canada's residential school legacy. Analysing archival material and interviews with former students, politicians, bureaucrats, church officials, and the Chief Commissioner of the TRC, Miller reveals a major obstacle to achieving reconciliation – the inability of Canadians at large to overcome their flawed, overly positive understanding of their country's history. This unique, timely, and provocative work asks Canadians to accept that the root of the problem was Canadians like them in the past who acquiesced to aggressively assimilative policies.
Keith Martin, Dylan Robinson & David Garneau, 2016 (e-book)
Arts of Engagement focuses on the role that music, film, visual art, and Indigenous cultural practices play in and beyond Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools. It examines the impact of aesthetic and sensory experience in residential school history, at TRC national and community events, and in artwork and exhibitions not affiliated with the TRC. The essays question the ways in which key components of reconciliation such as apology and witnessing have social and political effects for residential school survivors, intergenerational survivors, and settler publics.
Ronald Niezen, 2017 (e-book)
Truth and Indignation offers a close and critical assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Niezen uses interviews with survivors and oblate priests and nuns, as well as testimonies, texts, and visual materials produced by the Commission to raise important questions. Thoughtful, provocative, and uncompromising in the need to tell the "truth" as he sees it, Niezen offers an important contribution to our understanding of TRC processes in general, and the Canadian experience in particular.
Patrick Macklem & Douglas Sanderson, 2016 (e-book)
In From Recognition to Reconciliation, twenty leading scholars reflect on the continuing transformation of the constitutional relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state. The book features essays on themes such as the role of sovereignty in constitutional jurisprudence, the diversity of methodologies at play in these legal and political questions, and connections between the Canadian constitutional experience and developments elsewhere in the world.
Danielle Metcalfe-Chenail, 2016 (e-book)
What is real reconciliation? This collection of essays from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contributors from across Canada welcomes readers into a timely, healing conversation – one we've longed for but, before now, have had a hard time approaching. These reflective and personal pieces come from journalists, writers, academics, visual artists, filmmakers, city planners, and lawyers, all of whom share their personal light-bulb moments regarding when and how they grappled with the harsh reality of colonization in Canada, and its harmful legacy.
Ashok Mathur, Jonathan Dewar, & Mike DeGagné, 2011 (e-book)
This third and final volume in a series of publications dedicated to reconciliation is populated by the perspectives of new Canadians and those outside the traditional settler communities of British and French. Because Canada is a nation of diverse cultures, its people drawn from every region of the world, any discussion of reconciliation must include the perspectives of those who have arrived in more recent days and those who trace their family histories beyond western European colonial states.
Written and directed by Jeff Barnaby, 2014
Running time: 1 hour, 28 minutes
Call number PN 1997.2 R496 2014 (DVD – 2 copies)
Written, produced & directed by Peter C. Campbell & Christine Welsh
Gumboot Productions, 1997
Running time: 44 minutes
Call number: E 96.6 K83 K83 1997 (DVD)
Directed by Nadia McLaren, 2007
Mongrel Media
Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes
Call number: E 96.5 M84 2008 (DVD)
Directed by Kent Monkman, 2015
National Film Board of Canada
Running time: 3 minutes
Streaming media
Directed by Tim Wolochatiuk, 2012
National Film Board of Canada
Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes
Streaming media
Written and directed by Jay Cardinal Villeneuve, 2017
National Film Board of Canada
Running time: 13 minutes
Streaming media
National Film Board of Canada, 1958
Running time: 8 minutes
Streaming media
Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2003
Running time: 28 minutes
Call number: E 96.5 W447 2003 (DVD – 2 copies)
Directed by Mike Downie, 2016
CBC Curio
Running time: 60 minutes
Streaming media
Directed by Gregory Coyes, 1996
National Film Board of Canada
Running time: 47 minutes
Streaming media
CBC Curio, 2012
Running time: 4 episodes, running time varies
Streaming media
The confirmation of the locations of unmarked burials at residential schools across Canada in 2021, including those at the Kuper Island School on Penelakut Island (east of Chemainus, Vancouver Island, 90 km from Victoria / lək̓ʷəŋən Territory), has further emphasized the ongoing and devastating impacts of Canada's Indian residential school system.
Indigenous communities and residential school survivors have, for many years, provided testimonies and spoken truths about Canada's Indian residential school system. In 2012 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada published the interim report, They Came for the Children: Canada, Aboriginal Peoples, and Residential Schools. In 2015, as volume 4 of the final report, Canada's Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials, was published. The summary, The Survivor's Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, provides just some of the personal testimony of survivors brought forward during the Commission.
Canadians have known about the atrocities of Canada's residential school system for a long time. It is time to listen, learn, and take action. In honour of both the children who did not survive, as well those who did, take some time today for learning as an act of reconciliation.
Caution: Many of the resources in this guide contain discussions or scenes of violence or representations of trauma which may be painful for readers/viewers – please exercise care.
If you need help: The KUU-US Crisis Line Society provides 24-hour phone support for Indigenous people in BC. The KUU-US Crisis Line can be reached toll-free at 1-800-588-8717. Individuals can also call the Youth Line at 250-723-2040 or the Adult Line at 250-723-4050.
The Indian Residential School Crisis Line 1-866-925-4419 is available 24-hours a day for anyone experiencing pain or distress as a result of their or a loved one's residential school experience.
Camosun students can access help from the Counselling Centre. For resources related to emergency and after hours support, on-campus support, and other information, visit the Counselling Centre Resources webpage.
Louise B. Halfe, 2021
Call number: PS 8565 A4335 B87 2021
Richard Wagamese, 2016
E-book
Louise Bernice Halfe, 1994
E-book
George Kenny, translated by Patricia M. Ningewance, 2014
E-book
NISHGA by 
From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor by 
The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir by 
Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch by 
My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell by 
The National Film Board of Canada’s open-access Indigenous Voices and Reconciliation channel features an array of creative, documentary, and animated films.
