We Were Children

The documentary takes up the residential schools of Canada. The system ran for more than a hundred and thirty years and ended in 1996. Over that time more than a hundred thousand First Nations children had to attend those schools. Attendance was required by law. The schools were run on government money. Those running them were various Christian churches. There were eighty of these schools across the country. Most of the children were sent to schools far away. They were cut off from their families and their land. In the schools they met violence, hardship and degradation. Their culture was to be erased entirely. The schools were openly part of a programme of assimilation. Their stated purpose was to kill the Indian in the child. The film tells this through the words of two people. Glen Anaquod and Lyna Hart speak in Tim Wolochatiuk’s Canadian documentary of 2012.