Chief Phil Fontaine was ripped from his family at age six in 1951 and while his mother wept, was forcibly enrolled in a boarding school set up to assimilate Canada's indigenous peoples.
His 10-year education left him and 80,000 fellow Aboriginals who attended the segregated schools disconnected from their culture, families, communities and feeling “ashamed” of being born native, he said.
The experience has also been blamed for gross poverty and desperation in native communities that breeds abuse, suicide, and crime.
Today, as part of a multibillion dollar settlement with former students — the largest settlement in Canadian history — Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will officially apologize for what Fontaine, now chief of the Assembly of First Nations, describes as the “darkest chapter in Canada’s history.”
And it will be the five-year focus of a commission headed by Canada’s top Aboriginal jurist, appointed in April to probe abuses of natives at the schools over more than a century.
“It was cultural genocide,” said Ted Quewezance, a residential school alumni and director of the National Residential School Survivors’ Society.
Starting in 1874, 150,000 Indian, Inuit and Metis children in Canada were forcibly enrolled in the boarding schools run by Christian churches on behalf of the federal government in an effort to integrate them into society.
Some 80,000 survivors alleged abuse by headmasters and teachers, who stripped them of their culture and language.
“They tried to kill the Indian in the child, to eradicate any sense of Indian-ness from Canada,” Fontaine said.
Most of Canada’s residential schools were shut down in the 1970s.
The last one closed in 1996 in Saskatchewan province.
There are some 1.3 million Aboriginals in Canada, out of a total population of 33 million.
Justice Harry LaForme, chair of the landmark Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, commented: “All of us Aboriginal people in some way have been impacted by the Indian residential school tragedy.”
Fontaine said Harper’s remarks are expected to take responsibility for past harms and for “denying us our existence as peoples.”
Following his apology, the commission plans to hear testimony from thousands of survivors and officials, as well as gather and review millions of government and church documents to be made public for the first time.
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