The Indian (First Nation) residential schools were primarily active following the passage of the Indian Act in 1876, until 1996, and were designed to remove children from the influence of their families and culture, and assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's existence, about 30% of native children, or roughly 150,000, were placed in residential schools nationally; at least 6,000 of these students died while in attendance.[118][119] The system has been described as cultural genocide: "killing the Indian in the child."[120][121][122] The Executive Summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that physical genocide, biological genocide, and cultural genocide all occurred: physical, through abuse; biological, through the disruption of reproductive capacity; and cultural, through forced assimilation.[123][124] Part of this process during the 1960s through the 1980s, dubbed the Sixties Scoop, was investigated and the child seizures deemed genocidal by Judge Edwin Kimelman, who wrote, "You took a child from his or her specific culture and you placed him into a foreign culture without any [counselling] assistance to the family which had the child. There is something dramatically and basically wrong with that."[125]
