I ask this because I'm curious if something similar didn't happen in other colonies run by Catholic imperial powers, or it's just not being reported as much.
I'm not sure if it was documented (or even inferred to happen) in Spanish Latin America, let alone the Spanish Philippines which in many places was run de facto for the most part by Catholic religious orders (and had a lot of native children for the "taking"). Maybe broadly there was a similar system in those places, but I can't be sure, and even then the names and specific policies and operations might be different, but I just want to know if the Catholic colonial powers (eg. Spain, France, Portugal) were ever known to forcibly grab and educate native children (and tear them from their families) in their other overseas colonies too.
(I guess the Canadian example counts if we go back to French colonial settlement but I understand this really became a bigger problem when Canada was already an autonomous British Commonwealth government.)
NOTE: I am not denying any cases of it happening outside Canada or the US if there's proof, of course, but as it is I know very little on non-Canadian/US examples.
In the Spanish Philippines, "educating" the native children would precisely run counter to the hegemony that the friar orders wanted to maintain: namely, their statuses as the only people who could read and write for miles around.
On account of its status as a distant and unprofitable colony, there was no particularly strong impetus for the Spanish government per se to "Hispanize" large swathes of the population. The only people willing to agree to carry this out to a degree were the religious corporations, and even then the process was purposely half-assed for centuries. Instead of teaching the natives Spanish, the friars instead learned the local languages of the natives - this would prevent them from "putting on airs", i.e. becoming learned enough to argue with them on the extortionate rates of their land rents and indulgences. The most that any average native child would learn would be rote prayers in Spanish or Latin, languages that they were unlikely to understand word for word. A secular clergy did exist which accepted natives into the priesthood, but their influence was harshly and bitterly contested by the Spanish friars - to a lethal fault. In short, it benefited the neglectful Spanish government and the landowning friar orders for Filipino natives to remain ignorant, illiterate and docile. It was the children who started being educated in Spanish knowledge, customs and values that started to cause a threat to Spanish rule.
Further reading:
- Pasyon and Rebolusyon by R. Ileto (fantastic book as to how the Filipino peasantry were able to subvert religious indoctrination to the aims of self-determination and class liberation)
- In Our Image by Stanley Karnow
- State and Society by Abinales and Amoroso
- The Philippines: A Past Revisited by R. Constantino
- A History of the Filipino People 8th ed. by T. Agoncillo
That's something I'm kind of curious about myself. Here in New Zealand, there were church-run schools, but they were very different from in Canada (for one thing, the vast majority of native schools were day schools). They had issues by modern-day standards, but they didn't kidnap children from their families.
It's kind of weird to me that Canada and New Zealand had such huge differences.