Over the years, I've talked to quite a few people who went to residential schools. Almost universally, when I asked them about it, the first thing they said was, “I got beaten for speaking my own language.”
In thinking about why that is, I mean, it's because probably the people who worked in those places weren't very nice—they were cruel and maybe they were sadistic—but I would have thought that the other reason was that they must have seen some connection between language and culture. If you wanted the kids to become European, then you had to get them to speak English, not to speak their own language. I wonder if you could talk to me a bit about the connection between language, culture and identity.