The land surrounding Burrard Inlet, in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, is part of the unceded territories of the Coast Salish Peoples. On the inlet’s south shore lies the city of Vancouver, while across the water four reserves line its north shore . . . These overlapping geographical, legal, and urban conditions are part of what might be called the scale of the reserve.

Writing about modernism in colonial contexts, architectural historian Gwendolyn Wright proposes that “the physical environment became a strategy for enforcing common values while maintaining difference within a conjoint modern world.” In Canada, little else exemplifies this statement so strongly as the century-long experiment known as residential schools.