In fact, Aboriginal people as a group were referred to as the "Indian Problem" by the superintendent of Indian Affairs and that education was the best way to eliminate it. The residential schooling has been devastating in regards to the future of Aboriginal people's culture and identity. Each child taken from their home has been robbed of their own identity and their ill effects of their experience of abuse and neglect will affect future generations to come. To understand the process of assimilation a person must understand history and it affects colonization on native culture. The residential school system has a history that predates Confederation (the first school was established in 1863 by the Roman Catholics at St. Mary's Mission in BC ) and was largely influenced by Canada's missionary experience with various religious organizations. The Federal Government began to play a role in the development and administration of this school system as early as 1874, mainly to meet its obligation, under the Indian Act, to provide an education to Aboriginal people, as well as to assist with their integration into the broader Canadian society. For Aboriginal people road ahead is not an easy one especially if they cannot agree in their own community what is best and to move on from the force-fed emotional roller coaster of the past. Aboriginal people are a product of colonization, which has oppressed them since the first day of European contact, and has done nothing but act a weapon of cultural destruction delivered upon them. The residential school system in my opinion never had good intentions and acted as a method to reshape the future of the Aboriginal culture designed for mainstream society. .
In looking at the development of the residential school system one must look at the determining factors that contributed to its implement. A when time when European settlers were being urged to come to Canada to set up a white society, the rule of religious missionaries and Christianity as it driving force.
