Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement
The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) is an agreement between the Government of Canada and approximately 86,000 Native Canadians who at some point were enrolled as children in the Canadian Indian residential school system, a system which was in place between 1879 and 1996. The IRSSA recognized the damage inflicted by the residential schools and established a $2 billion compensation package for all former IRS students and, in particular, those who had been abused or otherwise harmed. The agreement, announced in 2006, was the largest class action settlement in Canadian history. As of December 2012 a total of $1.62 billion has been paid to 78,750 former students.
Sleeping Children Awake
While day schools for First Nations, Metis and Inuit children always far outnumbered residential schools, a new consensus emerged in the early twenty-first century that the latter schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children who attended them by removing them from their families. They were also said to deprive them of their ancestral languages, and cultural practises. Many of the students were said to have suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of staff and other students.