How can this be possible?

Ok.

So I was doing a little research on residential schools, and here's an article:


Here's the part that was new to me: "The last residential school closed in 1996."

1996? I was already shocked when I was under the impression that the last residential school closed in 1984, but 1996? Is this possible? How is it possible? How can something so blatantly racist still have been operating in Canada as recently as 11 years ago? I was alive then! I was already 11! You can't even try and (weakly) rationalize it with "Oh, back then no one realized it was wrong..."

So I went hunting through Wikipedia to see which school it was, but there're just a lot of schools listed as "closing date unknown."

Yeah, so I know this doesn't directly relate to language or linguistics, but as someone who thinks that First Nations' languages should really be studied if people really want to know how different languages can be (and correlatingly, what this UG thing really looks like), it is indirectly related.