the residential schools. Many protested the lack of decent educational opportunities available, but the government took little action until after World War I, when European-Canadians first began to acknowledge discriminatory treatment towards Indians." Indigenous resistance is defined, in the words of Anishinaabe scholar-artist Leanne Simpson as "a radical and complete overturning of the nation-state's political formations." During this time Native people found ways to resist this colonial endeavor. Those that survived used their knowledge to speak back against colonialism, as historians Brian Klopotek and Brenda Child explain, "In Canada, the results of this system were more complicated than the government anticipated. Often students returned to their reserves to become leaders, while others entered the labor market and competed with Euro-American workers." The Canadian government was displeased with this, "As one minister for Indian Affairs noted in 1897, "we are educating these Indians to compete industrially with our own peoples, which seems to me a very undesirable amount of public money." The government, perceiving Indian education as too generous, reduced the services available to First Nations peoples beginning in 1910 and emphasized low cost schooling thereafter." Apologies Acknowledgment of the wrongs done by the residential school system began in the 1980s. United Church of Canada In 1986, the first apology for residential schools by any institution in Canada was from the United Church of Canada in Sudbury, Ontario. At the 1986 31st General Council, the United Church of Canada responded to the request of Indigenous peoples that it apologize to them for its part in colonization and adopted the apology. Rev. Bob Smith stated: We imposed our civilization as a condition of accepting the gospel. We tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. As a result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred, and we are not what we are meant by God to be. We ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us in the Spirit of Christ so that our peoples may be blessed and God's creation healed. The elders present at the General Council expressly refused to accept the apology and chose to receive the apology, believing further work needed to be done. In 1998, the church apologized expressly for the role it played in the residential school system. On