Today Canada marks 150 years of Confederation with lavish firework displays, celebrations and concerts. Behind these festivities, however, the anniversary has also occasioned soul-searching about the past, particularly the government’s intense suppression of aboriginal culture in residential schools. These were closed in 1998 after more than a century of institutionalized racism had made them a byword for physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In 2015, after researching the history of these schools for six years, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission described the policy that established them as one that “can best be described as
