CANADA
The New York Times
By IAN Austin
OTTAWA — Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”
That is the conclusion reached by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after six years of intensive research, including 6,750 interviews. The commission published a summary version on Tuesday of what will ultimately be a multivolume report, documenting widespread physical, cultural and sexual abuse at government-sponsored residential schools that Indian, Inuit and other indigenous children were forced to attend.
The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches, were in operation for more than a century, from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998.
The commission found that 3,201 students died while attending the schools, many of them because of mistreatment or neglect — the first comprehensive tally of such deaths.
The report links the abuses at the schools, which came to broad public attention over the last four decades, to a number of social, health, economic and emotional problems afflicting many indigenous Canadians today. And it concluded that while some of the teachers and administrators at the schools were well intentioned, the overriding motive for the program was economic, not educational.
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