The last residential school closed in 1996, and in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to investigate the history of the schools. Many more were kidnapped and adopted out to white families. Many children who died were buried in unmarked graves and have never been identified, while those who survived had neither the cultural knowledge to reintegrate into their families nor the skills to assimilate into white society. In practice, the schools were successful in cutting children off from their cultures, if the children survived at all-mortality rates were extremely high due to poor conditions, inadequate medical care, and unwillingness on the part of school officials to quarantine or treat the huge number of students infected with tuberculosis.

Milloy has argued that the goal of these schools was to 'kill the Indian in the child' by removing children from their families, forbidding them to speak their native languages or practice their religious beliefs, and in theory, preparing them to assimilate into mainstream Canadian society. Cherie Dimaline currently lives in Toronto where she coordinates the annual Indigenous Writers' Gathering.Though the Canadian residential school program came into its full power in the 1860s and '70s (after the passage of the Indian Act and an amendment that made attendance at residential or day schools mandatory for Indigenous children), efforts to assimilate Indigenous populations into European colonial society had been going on since the French arrived in New France in the 17th century. In 2014, she was named the Emerging Artist of the Year at the Ontario Premier's Award for Excellence in the Arts, and became the first Aboriginal Writer in Residence for the Toronto Public Library. She is an author and editor from the Georgian Bay Métis community whose award-winning fiction has been published and anthologized internationally. Cherie Dimaline wins her first Governor General's Literary Award in 2017 with The Marrow Thieves. Cherie Dimaline currently lives in Toronto where she coordinates the annual Indigenous Writers' Gathering.

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline