Elementary education is one common experience we all share as Canadians—Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal—and even that is not so common as far as the experience goes.

Many students, most notably Aboriginal students, may disengage from that “mandatory” relationship with one another at school as early as junior high. For many Aboriginal students, the lack of information about, and value of, Aboriginal people in our education systems and curricula is too much, and they leave school very young.

The legacy of residential schools lives on in Aboriginal people across Canada. Survivors, along with their children and grandchildren, still bear the scars of being torn away from their families and communities and denied their culture and language.