For more than a century, Canadian governments removed aboriginal children from their homes and put them in residential schools modelled on Victorian poor houses. Some 150,000 passed through 139 of these Dickensian establishments from 1883 to 1998. In the 1940s they housed nearly a third of aboriginal children of school age. Half were physically or sexually abused and around 6,000 died. Today Canada's 1.4m aboriginal people have lower incomes on average and higher rates of incarceration, suicide and disease than the general population. Those brutal boarding schools are part of the reason.
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