These attempts of forced assimilation have failed, in part due to the resilience and resistance of many Indigenous communities. Moreover, many of the residential schools were severely underfunded, providing poor nutrition and living conditions for children in their care, leading to illness and death. In addition to the cultural and social effects of being forcibly displaced, many children suffered physical, sexual, psychological, and/or spiritual abuse while attending the schools, which has had enduring effects including, health problems, substance abuse, mortality/suicide rates, criminal activity, and disintegration of families and communities. As admitted by government and church officials, the explicit purpose of the residential school system was “to civilize and Christianize Aboriginal children”. More than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children attended the church-run schools between their establishment in the 1870s and the closure of the last school in the mid-1990s. The residential school system was intended to eradicate the language, cultural traditions and spiritual beliefs of Indigenous children in order to assimilate them into the Canadian society. intermediate and proximal) are constructed.Īmong colonial policies, residential schooling has stood out as especially damaging to Indigenous peoples. Loppie Reading and Wien note that colonialism, a distal determinant of health, is the basis on which all other determinants (i.e. Many of the illnesses and conditions that are disproportionately experienced by Indigenous peoples, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, have therefore been attributed to the lasting effects of colonialism, including the Indian Act, the reserve system, and residential schooling. In large part, these health disparities have been a result of government policies to assimilate Indigenous peoples into the Euro-Canadian ways of life, leading to physical and emotional harms to children, lower educational attainment, loss of culture and language, and the disconnect of family structures. It is well established that Indigenous peoples in Canada experience a disproportionate burden of ill health compared to the non-Indigenous population. The effects of colonization are apparent in all aspects of Indigenous peoples’ health and well-being, affecting not only their physical health, but the mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness. Future empirical research should focus on developing a clearer understanding of the aetiology of these effects, and particularly on identifying the characteristics that lead people and communities to be resilient to them. The empirical literature can be seen as further documenting the negative health effects of residential schooling, both among former residential school attendees and subsequent generations. Effects on mental and emotional well-being included mental distress, depression, addictive behaviours and substance mis-use, stress, and suicidal behaviours. Physical health outcomes linked to residential schooling included poorer general and self-rated health, increased rates of chronic and infectious diseases. Most focused on the impacts of residential schooling among First Nations, but some included Métis and Inuit. Sixty-one articles were selected for inclusion in the review. Papers were coded using the following categories: Indigenous identity group, geography, age-sex, residential school attendance, and health status. Citations that did not focus on health and residential school among a Canadian Indigenous population were excluded. For this review, nine databases were used: Bibliography of Native North Americans, Canadian Health Research Collection, CINAHL, Google Scholar, Indigenous Studies Portal, PubMed, Scopus, Statistics Canada, and Web of Science. MethodsĪ scoping review of the empirical peer-reviewed literature was conducted, following the methodological framework of Arksey and O’Malley (2005). Our objective was to identify the extent and range of research on residential school attendance on specific health outcomes and the populations affected. The history of residential schools has been identified as having long lasting and intergenerational effects on the physical and mental well-being of Indigenous populations in Canada.
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