Canadian National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (ESL exercise)

HOLIDAYS: National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (Canada)

Choose the best word(s) from the following list to complete each sentence: exact, politicians, deprived, injustices, disease, established, assimilate, shut down, graves, statutory.

1. The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is Canada's newest holiday, officially at the beginning of 2023.

2. The holiday's aim is to recognize and remember the ( = wrongs) which occured at boarding schools for indigenous people.

3. It is a public holiday (known as a " holiday" in Canada) on the federal level, as well as on the provincial level in seven provinces.

4. Thousands of indigenous children dies while attending these schools, mostly from ( = some kind of illness).

5. Because of incomplete records, the number of deaths is unknown.

6. The death count is now thought to be higher than previously thought, with thousands of unmarked ( = burial sites) discovered on the grounds of former residential schools in 2021.

7. The residential schools were set up in way to limit the children's contact with their families. One of the goals of these institutions was to ( = forcibly integrate) these children into the dominant Canadian culture.

8. Apart from the limited contact with relatives, many of these children were of ( = prevented from using) their ancestral languages, and exposed to a variety of abuse.

9. The last federally-funded residential school ( = stopped operating) in 1997. It was only in the 2000s that Canadian began to recognize and apologize for the existence of these schools and the harm they did to indigenous children.

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