CANADA
CTV
Julia Parrish, CTV Edmonton
Published Monday, February 24, 2014
“It was the worst years of my life; I guess you could say it destroyed me.”
That’s how Jerry Wood, a man who spent eleven years as one of 150,000 aboriginal children pulled from his home, and placed in residential schools, looks at his time in the residential school system.
“I was trying to drown my experience in residential schools from the sexual abuse, the physical abuse, mental abuse, spiritual abuse that I went through,” Wood said.
On Monday, Wood, now an elder, was in the room to hear words he had been waiting decades for – when Archbishop Richard Smith of the Archdiocese of Edmonton issued a formal apology for the church’s role in the schools.
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