Warning: The story below contains details of residential schools that may be upsetting. Canada’s Indian Residential School Survivors and Family Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day at 1-866-925-4419.
Geraldine Shingoose spent nearly a decade of her childhood far from her family, at a boarding school she could not freely leave.
But it took many years after she got away from the Muscowequan Residential School, in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, before she was able to speak about what had happened to her there.
“Our history, the history of residential school, was never taught. It wasn't until the early 1990s when all these stories started coming out,” says Shingoose, 67, who attended Muscowequan from 1962 to 1971.
“I carried my story for a long time without sharing, and it definitely had an impact on my whole wellbeing, emotionally and mentally.”
Shingoose is among the more than 150,000 Indigenous children across Canada who were forced to attend residential schools between the 1870s and 1990s.
They were separated from their families, stripped of their cultures and languages, and subjected to widespread physical, psychological and sexual abuse.
Thousands are believed to have died at the institutions. One government official who oversaw the school system said in 1920 that it was designed to “get rid of the Indian problem”.
Today, nearly 30 years after the last residential school in Canada shut its doors, the intergenerational trauma of the system continues to be felt in First Nation, Metis and Inuit communities.
In 2021, the discoveries of unmarked graves believed to contain children’s remains on the grounds of former institutions pushed the issue to the fore once again, forcing Canadians to confront their country’s harmful legacy of colonialism.
But after this brief moment of reckoning, experts say the pendulum is now swinging in the opposite direction: An alarming trend of residential school denialism is gaining ground – and pouring salt on the wounds of survivors, their families and their communities.
“When people deny our stories, they're denying my truth. They're denying my abuses that I experienced in residential school – the mental, emotional, physical, spiritual and sexual abuse that I experienced,” Shingoose told Al Jazeera.
“They're trying to share a fake, different story about Canada's history, and they're denying our truth.”