CANADA
Yahoo! News
Al Jazeera
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report accusing the government of committing “cultural genocide” against indigenous survivors of the government’s brutal residential school system .
It was a damning indictment of Canada’s role in forcing some 154,000 Aboriginal children into those schools between 1874 and 1996.
They were separated from family, culture and their Aboriginal identity, and suffered physical and sexual abuse. It is estimated 6,000 children died while in these schools.
Andrew Wesley, a Cree native from Fort Albany, Ontario was one of the children who attended residential schools. At 69, he remembers his childhood and the schools that he said were meant “to take the Indian out the child”, and to assimilate them into Canada’s “white” mainstream.
Wesley said the root cause of the violence within Aboriginal communities today – domestic abuse, physical and sexual violence, even murder – was caused by the violent history in those schools and the large number of indigenous children abused there.
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