Resource Library

For educators in Canada, this guide contains activities, readings, lessons, and strategies to help you develop a meaningful civic education experience in your classroom.

A portrait of an indigenous Canadian woman on a reserve, 1930.

Since the beginning of its work in 2010, the commission has been collecting information about what was done to survivors in the residential schools and has worked to make this information public. From this process, the survivors receive public, communal acknowledgement and support for years of injustice and suffering.

The term Métis describes descendants of both Europeans and First Nations people (the Canadian government did not formally recognize the term until the Constitution Act of 1982).

Get insight into the complicated role the Christian church played in the Indian Residential Schools system.  

Indigenous elder, residential school survivor, and author Theodore Fontaine describes his mother's take on the residential schools.  

An Anishinaabe woman of Cree and Ojibway descent recalls the first instance in her childhood when she encountered the term Indian.   

Learn about the relationship between name, identity, and tradition reflected in Inuit naming practices.

Various scholars, indigenous and non-indigenous, discuss the charge of genocide regarding the Residential School system in Canada and its effects. This video is a part of the resource Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and The Indian Residential Schools.

Historian, and researcher-curator at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Dr. Karine Duhamel, details the Indian Act of Canada. This video is a part of the resource Stolen Lives: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada and The Indian Residential Schools.

Albert Canadien recounts his first day at an Indian Residential School and the assimilation he experienced.