Residential Schools and the Destruction of Indian Identity

The numbered treaties also promised to provide teachers and schools for Indian children. The need for education in the skills to function effectively in a setting that would soon be dominated by the white man was common ground for the Canadian government and the First Nations leadership. But the schools were understood to be on reserves, not distant residential schools, and there was no expectation on the Indians' part that the fundamental aim of the education their children would receive was to destroy their Indian identity.

--Peter H. Russell, Canada's Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 186.