CANADA
Ottawa Citizen
MARK KENNEDY, OTTAWA CITIZEN
Canadians must acknowledge that for generations their public schools have fed them misinformation about aboriginal people, says the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Justice Murray Sinclair, whose commission has examined the history and abuses that took place in Indian residential schools, made the comment in a personal interview with the Citizen.
Sinclair’s commission has finished six years of hearings and research and will publicly release its findings in Ottawa on June 2.
The TRC’s report will provide a detailed account of how 150,000 aboriginals were stripped from their families starting in the 1880s and sent to church-run schools established by the federal government. The last residential school closed in the 1990s.
The report will chronicle the abuse many faced, and how the system scarred several generations of aboriginals, leaving their communities in shambles.
But Sinclair emphasized that one of the most important messages that will come from the report is that the consequences of the school system are far more wide-reaching than many realize.
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