1，Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s, about 30 percent of Indigenous children were attending residential schools.
2，By 1950, nearly 90% of status Indian kids were attending day schools on their home reserve, not residential schools. And fewer than one-third of indigenous children at any time attended a residential school.
“The idea that we could walk a few blocks to school or take the bus to high school was an unimaginable luxury, we couldn’t conceive of it,” he said.
So in order to receive an education, Highway said he entered the Guy Hill Indian Residential School in Manitoba on September 1, 1958.
Highway, who wrote about his sub-Arctic childhood in last year’s “Permanent Astonishment,” told The Post that he credits his years spent at Guy Hill for his success in life.
“I went because my father wanted me to,” Highway said about his dad, a caribou hunter and champion dog sledder who was illiterate. “My oldest brother was illiterate, too. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to the rest of us kids. So we went.”
Highway said the Guy Hill school wasn’t perfect and that he witnessed and experienced some abuse.
But “I didn’t see any strange deaths,” he said. “A lot of the white people there were kind. The education I got there…set me up for life.”