A new centre at the University of British Columbia will aim to educate the public on the experiences of residential school survivors while memorializing thousands of children who did not live to talk about their experiences.

The Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre is under construction on UBC’s Vancouver campus and is set to be completed in the 2017-18 academic year. The donor-funded $5.5 million centre is an arm of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg.

According to the university, the centre was created in consultation with survivors and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It will focus on BC residential school students’ experiences and give those former students and their families access to records.

There will also be an education centre for visitors from the public or schools to learn about the history and effects of the residential school system, something that hasn’t been taught in mainstream education until recently.

Linc Kesler, director of UBC’s First Nations House of Learning, said the centre is a form of acknowledgement for those historically unacknowledged experiences.

“Through both policy and inaction, the circumstances of indigenous peoples have often been invisible in all but the most superficial ways. It is a responsibility of the university and the educational system as a whole to change that and provide the basis for more informed interactions.”

An important part of the centre will be a memorial site for an estimated 6,000 children who died while attending the schools.

The government-imposed system began in the late 1800s and involved cultural assimilation and often physical and/or sexual abuse. The last school closed in Saskatchewan in 1996. In that century, about 150,000 Indigenous children were forced into the schools.