Wikipedia:Today's featured article/December 26, 2017

The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous children who were removed from their families and culture to be assimilated into Canadian culture. It was funded by the government's Department of Indian Affairs, in keeping with the Indian Act of 1876, and administered by various churches. Over more than a century about 30 percent of Indigenous children (roughly 150,000) were placed in residential schools, where at least 6,000 of them died. The schools were intentionally located far away from home communities, and parental visits were further restricted by a pass system that confined Indigenous peoples to reserves. Students often graduated unable to fit into either their home communities or Canadian society, and impacted families have suffered disproportionately from post-traumatic stress, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide. The last federally operated residential school closed in 1996. The 2015 findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded that the system amounted to cultural genocide.