Indigenous children were forcibly separated from their families

I RECENTLY SAT DOWN TO WATCH THE LATEST incarnation of LM Montgomery’s classic novel Anne of Green Gables with my younger daughter. Reading the book and watching the 1980s television adaptation – starring Megan Follows as the 19th-century Canadian orphan Anne Shirley – had been such a rite of passage for me, and I wanted it to be the same for my own children.

Having been so familiar with the original story, I was surprised to find that Netflix and CBC’s 2017 adaptation, Anne with an E, had taken on a degree of dramatic licence, including the addition of a subplot about Anne’s friendship with an Indigenous girl named Ka’kwet. The carefully researched storyline, in which Ka’kwet is mistreated by the nuns at one of Canada’s notorious residential schools, was well received not only in Canada, but by viewers further afield. Overall, the series was praised for tackling a difficult topic and bringing the stories of Indigenous Canadians to a wider audience.

However, the story took on a new dimension when, less than two years after the final season of Anne with an Earrived on Netflix in 2020, archaeologists detected what they believed to be the unmarked graves of around 215 Indigenous students who had attended a real-life residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Reacting to the news in May 2021, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said it was “a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history”, and declared that the flags on all federal buildings should be lowered to half-mast in honour of “all Indigenous children who never made it home, the survivors and their families”. A month later, a further 751 graves were found at the site of another school in Saskatchewan.

To understand the context behind the discoveries, it is first necessary to know about the history of Canada’s so-called Indian Act. Passed in 1876, the legislation put strict controls on the nation’s Indigenous communities, including the taking of children – often forcibly – to live in religious schools across Canada. By the time the last institution closed in 1998, an estimated 150,000 students had passed through their doors. Separated from their families and communities, th