The toxic legacy of the British empire in Canada’s residential schools | Letters

David Stirrup and James Mackay on Britain's responsibility for systematic abuse and mistreatment of Indigenous children

Your editorial on the atrocities against First Nations children in Canadian residential boarding schools (1 July) bore the subheading: The discovery of hundreds of graves of Indigenous children is forcing a deeper reckoning with the country's past."

I have to ask why you are fixing only on Canada's history. All of the schools where human remains have been found were set up when Canada was a British dominion within the empire. The project of illegally expropriating Indigenous lands previously guaranteed under treaty goes back at least as far as the 1783 treaty of Paris, and one can draw a direct line from that act of dispossession to the eventual formalisation of the project of genocide in the boarding schools.