CANADA
CBC News
By Karina Roman, CBC News Posted: Dec 17, 2013
St. Anne’s Residential School survivors are before the Ontario Superior Court today in a bid to get the federal government to release documents the former students say would help corroborate their claims of abuse.
The documents they want are from a five-year Ontario Provincial Police investigation in the 1990s, as well as files from the subsequent trials that resulted in several convictions against school staff and supervisors.
St. Anne’s operated in Fort Albany, Ont., near James Bay, and was the site of some of the worst cases of abuse in the country, including physical and sexual abuse. Survivors tell stories of children being forced to eat their own vomit and of the nuns and brothers shocking children as young as six in a homemade electric chair.
“We’re just so tired of trying to convince people that this happened,” said Edmund Metatawabin in an interview with CBC News. He attended St. Anne’s for eight years starting in 1956.
Under the residential school settlement, former students can make a claim for compensation through the independent assessment process (IAP). In a private hearing, they tell their stories to an adjudicator. The adjudicator is meant to have information on the school, known perpetrators and convictions in advance. However, until recently, the information provided on St. Anne’s said there were no known incidents of sexual abuse at the school, despite the police investigation and trials.
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