SELECTED THESES ON THE CIRCUMPOLAR ARCTIC

It is the purpose of this thesis to record the history of the federal government's record regarding the northern school system and the residential schools in relation to the Inuit from the inauguration of the school system in 1955 to 1970, when responsibility for education in the north was delegated to the new NWT government. The research is based predominantly on primary sources. This thesis demonstrates that the residential schools were used to commit the assault of cultural cannibalism. The residential schools were assimilation factories where the Inuit children entered as Inuit and left Canadianized. The government abused the Inuit by removing them from their families and communities while dispatching them to distant lands where they were housed in the large hostels of the schools for ten months of the year. The hostels deprived the Inuit of contact with both their families and their culture.'