CANADA
APTN
APTN National News
Indian Affairs officials covered-up the abuse of children at residential schools and interfered with police investigations, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) says.
TRC Chair Marie Wilson said the commission found that Indian Affairs was involved in an “accepted system of corruption and cover-up” of abuses committed against Indigenous children who were forced to attend Indian residential schools for over a century.
About 150,000 Indigenous children, or seven generations, attended residential schools over the system’s century long existence.
The TRC released a summary of its final report Tuesday in Ottawa following six years of work that saw it travel to 300 communities and hear from 6,750 survivors.
Wilson said throughout the history of residential schools, the federal government, through the Indian Affairs department, actively worked with church-run residential school officials to keep reports of abuses under-wraps despite inquiries from police agencies.
“The churches running the schools were free to hold their own investigations which rarely led to more than seeking out and accepting the denials of accused school officials,” said Wilson, who spoke during the release of the TRC’s report. “We recorded a number of troubling incidents showing failures to take student’s complaints seriously, failure to take action in the rare instances a school official was convicted, failures to report incidents to the local police or the Department of Indian Affairs.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.