During a time when America was trying to make Indians like them so they would blend into society, they forced the native children to boarding schools. Many of the children were taken from home and sent far way with hundreds of hours of travel in small carts or sometimes by foot. The Children were then forced to learn English and were taught to become like the whites. The children suffered brutal physical, emotion, and sexual abuse from the facility of the schools. The schools even did biological experiments with diseases on the native children at the schools. About 150,000 children were forced to go tho these schools, and there are over 50,000 of those children died. The schools had so many deaths happen over the years that they stopped keeping track of the deaths and started mass graves. There was not a local boarding school near the Haida Indian reservation so the children were taken to a far away one. One of the schools that the Haida children were taken to was called Chilliwack.
The Haida people are trying to heal from the horrific acts that these schools did. James Hart and his son, Gwaliga have been commissioned by philanthropist and art collector Michael Audain to carve a traditional 55 foot Haida totem pole that will be placed on UBC’s Point Grey campus, on unceded Musqueam Territory, in memory of all the lives lost in the residential schools. “It’s national story, part of our Canadian history, and so this one was designed with that in mind,” says Gwaliga. “We’re really paying recognition and respect to the time before residential schools, but also to during and after.” They invited survivors and family members of victims and survivors to hammer in thousands of copper nails to represent the children that were killed in these schools.
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