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.
‘SHORTSIGHTED’: Using aid as leverage is punitive, would not be regarded well among Pacific Island nations and would further open the door for China, an academic said New Zealand has suspended millions of dollars in budget funding to the Cook Islands, it said yesterday, as the relationship between the two constitutionally linked countries continues to deteriorate amid the island group’s deepening ties with China. A spokesperson for New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs Winston Peters said in a statement that New Zealand early this month decided to suspend payment of NZ$18.2 million (US$11 million) in core sector support funding for this year and next year as it “relies on a high trust bilateral relationship.” New Zealand and Australia have become increasingly cautious about China’s growing presence in the Pacific
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Canada and the EU on Monday signed a defense and security pact as the transatlantic partners seek to better confront Russia, with worries over Washington’s reliability under US President Donald Trump. The deal was announced after a summit in Brussels between Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Antonio Costa. “While NATO remains the cornerstone of our collective defense, this partnership will allow us to strengthen our preparedness ... to invest more and to invest smarter,” Costa told a news conference. “It opens new opportunities for companies on both sides of the
ESPIONAGE: The British government’s decision on the proposed embassy hinges on the security of underground data cables, a former diplomat has said A US intervention over China’s proposed new embassy in London has thrown a potential resolution “up in the air,” campaigners have said, amid concerns over the site’s proximity to a sensitive hub of critical communication cables. The furor over a new “super-embassy” on the edge of London’s financial district was reignited last week when the White House said it was “deeply concerned” over potential Chinese access to “the sensitive communications of one of our closest allies.” The Dutch parliament has also raised concerns about Beijing’s ideal location of Royal Mint Court, on the edge of the City of London, which has so
RSS