Thousands of Canadian Aborigines who were placed in state-funded Christian residential schools were expected to appear before a special study commission starting on Wednesday to share their stories of abuse and forced cultural assimilation at the hands of school officials.
Manitoba Justice Murray Sinclair, the head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools, said at the first of a series of public hearings on Wednesday that the experiences of the former students will no longer be relegated to the sidelines of Canadian history.
“They will tell you something they have never told anyone before; it is the kind of truth that causes you to squirm,” Sinclair said. “They are coming here because they have something they need to say. This will be the first time they will speak of these things. It is about their truths.”
“The truth eventually will heal us all,” he added.
Sinclair spoke in Winnipeg, Manitoba, at the first of seven public hearings taking place across the country.
From the 19th century until the 1970s, about 150,000 Aborigines, Inuit and Metis children were forced to attend some 130 residential schools across Canada in a painful attempt to rid them of their native cultures and languages and integrate them into a European-dominated Canadian society.
The last school closed outside Regina, Saskatchewan, in 1996.
About 85,000 former students are still alive.
The federal government acknowledged 10 years ago that physical and sexual abuse was rampant in the schools. Many students recall being beaten for speaking their native languages, as well as losing touch with their parents and customs.
That legacy of abuse has been cited by Aboriginal leaders as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reservations. Canada’s more than 1 million Aborigines remain among the country’s poorest and most disadvantaged groups.
“Our goal is to lay the groundwork that will help us to close the divide between Aboriginal people and the rest of Canadians,” Sinclair said. “We will do that through the sharing of truths and understandings so there is a role for each of us. We all have a responsibility while this is occurring to make it happen.”
The commission was created as part of a C$5 billion (US$4.88 billion) class action settlement in 2006 — the largest in Canadian history — between the government, churches and the 90,000 surviving students.
The settlement gave about 80,000 former students about C$1.9 billion in compensation, and it also set up a forum for their stories to be heard and recorded in a bid to help Canadians learn about that dark period of their history. About C$60 million will fund the commission, which will be granted access to government and Church records.
Two years after the settlement was reached, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper publicly apologized to Canada’s native citizens for the legislation that placed children in residential schools.
Federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl said Ottawa plans to repeal the section of the Indian Act that allowed Aboriginal children to be sent to residential schools.
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