Beginning in the late 1800s, the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) officially encouraged the growth of the residential school system as a valuable component in a wider policy of integrating Indigenous people into European-Canadian society.[11] Responsible for separating children from their families and communities, this process was found by the TRC to be cultural genocide, a conclusion that echoed the words of historian John S. Milloy, who argued that the system's aim was to "kill the Indian in the child".[14]:42[17][18] As the system was designed as an immersion program, children were in many schools prohibited from, and sometimes punished for, speaking their own languages or practising their own faiths.[19] The primary stated goal was to convert Indigenous children to Christianity and to civilize them.[12]