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Canada formally apologizes to native peoples
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will offer a thorough and detailed apology today to the nation's native peoples for abuses and the loss of aboriginal languages and culture they suffered during a century of forced assimilation at residential schools.
The apology has been billed by the government as a chance to redress a dark chapter in Canadian history. But the day before the landmark statement was marked by wrangling over whether native leaders were adequately consulted over the content, and anger that they will not be allowed to respond in the House of Commons.
Some survivors, as the former schoolchildren are widely called, say the apology is coming only grudgingly under intense pressure from native groups, and must be matched by action. But it is widely recognized as a significant step for a government that had previously sought to limit its responsibility for the harm caused by its assimilation policy.
For more than a century, native Canadian children were sent to boarding schools run by churches and the government to adapt them to modern society and to Christianize them. Many suffered sexual and psychological abuse, and their detachment from their families and communities has had effects across generations.
Several churches already offered apologies in the late 1980s and 1990s, and the government's head of Indian affairs made a statement of reconciliation in 1998. A lawsuit settled in 2006 created a $1.9-billion compensation fund, and an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission was launched on June 1.
But today's statement is the government's first formal expression of responsibility and remorse for the forced assimilation program and its legacy of damage. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will offer a thorough and detailed apology today to the nation's native peoples for abuses... more -
Mass graves revealed of Indian children in Canadian schools who never made it home
The horror of the genocide in Canada's Indian Residential Schools became public, as the locations of 28 mass graves of Indian children were revealed.
An unknown number of Indian children died in captivity at Indian Residential Schools in Canada.
The murders included children killed in electric chairs. Some of the bodies were incinerated in the school furnaces, while others were buried in mass graves.
Eyewitness Sylvester Greene described how he helped bury a young Inuit boy at the United Church's Edmonton residential school in 1953.
"We were told never to tell anyone by Jim Ludford, the Principal, who got me and three other boys to bury him. But a lot more kids got buried all the time in that big grave next to the school."
The location of mass graves of residential school children was revealed by the Independent Tribunal Established Squamish Nation Territory ("Vancouver, Canada") on April 10.
At a public ceremony and press conference held outside the colonial "Indian Affairs" building in downtown Vancouver, the Friends and Relatives of the Disappeared (FRD) released a list of twenty eight mass graves across Canada holding the remains of untold numbers of aboriginal children who died in Indian Residential Schools.
The list was distributed to the world media and to United Nations agencies, as the first act of the newly-formed International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada (IHRTGC), a non-governmental body established by indigenous elders....
Read more at link.
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from TouchArt.net and OneEarthBlog.blogspot.com
Photo - Book cover art for "Home to Medicine Mountain" about Indian children and Indian Schools by California Indian Artist Judith Lowry.
http://www.childrensbookpress.org/ob/home.html
Home to Medicine Mountain is the story of two young brothers who are separated from their family and sent to live in a government-run Indian residential school in the 1930s—an experience shared by generations of Native American children throughout North America. At these schools, children were forbidden to speak their Indian languages and made to unlearn their Indian ways. Sadly, they were often not able to go home to their families for summer vacation.
Native American artist Judith Lowry based this personal account on the stories her father and Uncle Stanley told her. With beautiful art, and a lyrical, moving narrative, Lowry and author Chiori Santiago tenderly relate how Stanley and Benny Len find a way home by train one summer. Inspired by their dreams of home and the memories of their grandmother's stories, the boys embark on an adventurous journey from the harsh residential school to their triumphant welcome home at Susanville, California, in the shadow of Yo-Tim Yamne (Medicine Mountain).
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Posted by Brenda Norrell - April 18, 2008 at 9:57 pm The horror of the genocide in Canada's Indian Residential Schools became public, as the locations of 28 mass graves of Indian chi... more
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