Indigenous people make up more than 4 percent of Canada’s population, but a series of legal battles has the potential to shift the national and political landscape in their favor. In recent years, indigenous people in Canada have won more than 230 legal cases against the government relating to natural resource development, while the Supreme Court and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal have issued landmark rulings granting many groups greater authority and rights to territory, funding and services.

For hundreds of years, indigenous people in Canada were victims of state policies that were explicitly written to eradicate their cultures, appropriate their lands and deny them political autonomy under treaties and laws like the Indian Act of 1876. The law gave the Canadian government the power to dictate who was considered an “Indian,” move indigenous people to resource-poor and isolated reserves and control their finances. It remains the core of many policies and regulations in effect today.

Around 150,000 aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and sent into a state-financed, church-operated residential school system for more than a century before the program was shut down in the 1990s. According to some estimates, as many as 6,000 children died and many more suffered physical and sexual abuse.

Other government programs forcibly sterilized indigenous women and put more than 16,000 aboriginal children up for adoption by white families.

Indigenous communities have long criticized the museum for not officially recognizing their historical oppression as genocide. Museum officials say the exhibits try to educate the public about these issues by prominently featuring the testimony of residential school survivors and information on the effects of colonization.