DCHP-2

residential school survivor residential-school survivor DCHP-2 (October 2016)

• n. — Aboriginal

  an Aboriginal person who attended a residential school.

  Type: 1. Origin — In the UK and in other locations outside of Canada, residential school means a boarding school, sometimes one for children with disabilities (see OED-3, s.v. "residential school"). Because of the semantic change that the term has undergone in Canada, where it has come to denote a school for Aboriginal children who were forcibly taken from their communities, residential school survivor has been adopted to refer to the former students of these schools, who were often severely mistreated and abused. Since many have seen the effects of these schools as genocidal (see residential school), the term may have been formed by analogy with Holocaust survivor. The term residential school survivor also acknowledges the continued suffering experienced by former students of residential schools and their communities.
  Internet domain searches indicate that residential school survivor is almost exclusively used in Canada (see Chart 1).

  See also: residential school  Sixties Scoop  Truth and Reconciliation Commission  reconciliation week  reconciliation