In the 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S. and Canada thousands of native children were taken from their homes and placed in boarding schools where they were stripped of their culture and heritage, forced to dress and behave in a way that was acceptable to their white teachers, and harshly punished for speaking their languages. These schools were funded by the federal governments and run by the government and several churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, Anglican/Episcopal Church, and Presbyterian Church. It has recently come into the spotlight that cruel mistreatment and cultural genocide are not the only crimes of these schools when mass graves were found at several former residential schools in Canada. This has prompted a movement to investigate the land on which any residential school one stood in both the U.S. and Canada and in this work, the bones of hundreds more children have been found. The last of these residential schools only closed in 1996.
