CANADA
The London Free Press

By Debora Van Brenk, The London Free Press

Twenty years after Ontario’s last residential school for First Nations and Metis children closed, the echoes resound among survivors’ children and grandchildren.

“The impact of residential schools has been inter-­generational, so even young (aboriginal) people who haven’t been to residential schools have been directly impacted,” said Barb MacQuarrie, director of the Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women.

“It broke down and fragmented people’s identity.”

MacQuarrie is an organizer of a conference in London Tuesday and Wednesday on what residential schools represented to aboriginal families.

The majority of the 250 attendees are teachers or teachers in training who learned a Euro-centric version of First Nations history, MacQuarrie said. “It’s our ignorance. It creates an unintentional racism a lot of times.”