"Residential schooling has featured prominently in the formal education of Aboriginal peoples from before Confederation until it was phased out in the 1960's - 1980's. Throughout
this period, many Aboriginal people have complained about many aspects of their treatment in many of these schools. Ultimately the schools were eliminated, but these complaints have yet
to be adequately addressed. At a minimum, there has been no firm acknowledgement2 of the harm done by the residential school system. A close examination of the system reveals many
injustices which have had lasting effects upon Aboriginal people and their communities. In light of these injustices, the object of this study is two-fold. First, we seek to examine the
history of the residential school system from the point of view of the law of fiduciary obligation and assess the legality of the conduct of those responsible for its design and operation. The point is not to examine any particular case or cases, nor to assess the likelihood of success in actual litigation. Rather it is to apply the legal principles of fiduciary obligation to the establishment and operation of residential schools to ground an argument that serious legal wrongs have been committed over the course of that history. This may open the door to actual individual or community claims against the government or Churches. Whether it does so or not, the premise of this study is that an examination of the lawfulness of the conduct of the residential schools is essential to our ability as a society to come to terms with this part of our past.

Our second object is to consider possible paths of extra-legal redress that might be pursued. Even if liability could be established through the courts, there are substantive and practical reasons for preferring a comprehensive settlement of these issues rather than pursuing case by case adjudication. However, the residential school experience may be too little known and its aftermath too little understood by policy makers and the general Canadian public to make such a settlement politically possible. We will therefore consider the merits of a public inquiry to investigate the operation and effects of the residential school system. Assuming that such a thorough airing of the issues would help make the case for a comprehensive, negotiated
settlement with those individuals and communities who have suffered and continue to suffer, we will conclude by briefly examining the lessons revealed by the experiences of other communities
and groups in attempting to negotiate compensation packages for historic injustices. When dealing with the possible legal wrongs arising out of more than one hundred years of daily operation of hundreds of schools, it is impossible to present a detailed account of the facts. Some wrongs will have been committed in some schools and not others; some perpetrated against some residents of a particular school and not others; in some cases the links necessary to establish institutional responsibility for the acts of individual teachers will be present and in others not. Every possible cause of action that might have arisen over this period cannot be identified and treated individually. In addition, much more research needs to be done into the historical record before any firm conclusions could be drawn about particular cases and individuals or institutions. This study undertakes a preliminary analysis of the relevance of the law of fiduciary obligations in light of the information currently available. We will focus primarily on harms arising out of the design of the system itself and the main forms of abusive behaviour that have surfaced in published accounts of survivors. In other words, the law will be analyzed against the backdrop of certain `typical' harms as drawn from the secondary literature.

This study is divided into three parts. Our discussion of the legal issues and extra-legal remedies requires that we set the scene with a brief overview of the history of residential school policy and of the operation of the schools and the conditions within them. This overview forms Part I. Part II is concerned with the applicability of the law of fiduciary obligation. Finally, we turn to a consideration of the usefulness of a public inquiry and the prospects for a negotiated redress package in Part III"--Introduction.