The Dominion - Truth and Reconciliation

Aboriginal Peoples' Stories Remain Unheard

stephlaw — Wed, 09 May 2012 10:13:37 +0000

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has travelled across the nation, but few have paid attention

Note: This article may be triggering or distressful. To access the Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line, dial toll-free 1-866-925-4419.

VANCOUVER—The national Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, which started over two years ago, has been largely ignored by the Canadian public, despite the participation of thousands of residential school survivors and countless others, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous.

In fact, the first and only history lesson many Canadians ever received about residential schools was through the Prime Minister of Canada's "Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools," issued in June 2008 and broadcast from coast to coast.

The commission is now over halfway through its five-year mandate. Although the government established the commission in 2008, it took until July 2009 before Head Commissioner Justice Murray Sinclair, Commissioner Chief Wilton Littlechild, Commissioner Marie Wilson and a ten-member Indian Residential School Survivor Committee began gathering statements and documents.

The core of the commission’s mandate is to establish the truth about the schools, educate all Canadians about that history and begin a dialogue about reconciliation.

"Residential schools were part of an overall approach toward Aboriginal people in this country," Head Commissioner Justice Sinclair told reporters in Vancouver at a press conference in February, when the commission issued an interim update on its activities and released several preliminary recommendations.

"It is commonly said that it takes a village to raise a child. The Government of Canada took Indian children away from their villages and placed them into institutions that were the furthest thing away from a village that you could expect," he continued. "Then on top of that, the Government of Canada set out to destroy their villages, so when they got out of those institutions, they didn't have a village to go back to."

Thus far, the commission has held statement-gathering and outreach events in over 500 communities across Canada—including a prison in the Northwest Territories—and national events in Winnipeg and Inuvik.

It has not been easy for survivors to get to a microphone and relive their experiences at these events. But the commission has helped them realize what they’ve overcome.

"I think if you document something, you can't say it didn't happen,” Kecia Larkin, 41, told The Dominion, after speaking at the commission’s regional event in Victoria in April. “And if people who have spoken find some pride in themselves, in the courage to speak out, then that's something that has been accomplished.”

At the regional event in Victoria, 158 residential school survivors and other affected people shared their experiences. More than 2,000 people attended the event and another 3,300 people from 16 countries tuned in to the live webcast.

The commission is not only examining the history of residential schools, but also their ongoing impact on communities as a whole, and on intergenerational survivors like Larkin—the residential school students’ children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so forth.

"I've seen a lot of pride there," said Larkin. "But it was very painful for a lot of people. It was very heart wrenching. It made people cry out loud."

From the 1860s up until the 1990s, more than 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children attended residential schools. Some schools were operated directly by the Canadian government and some by Canada through partnerships with church organizations.

Cut off from their families and communities, students were forbidden to speak their own language or engage in their own cultural and spiritual practices. Many children experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

Larkin’s mother and grandmother attended residential schools, and her father attended a boarding school. As a young child, she traveled around North America with her mother, who was involved with the Red Power movement in the early 1970s, which came out of the American Indian Movement and a growing sense of pan-Indian identity. It was not until they moved to Alert Bay when Larkin was four years old that she experienced the legacy of the schools. After being caught for years in cycles of familial violence and abuse, amidst a community dealing with youth drug use, suicides and sexual abuse by the local school principal, she left her home at the age of 15.

Larkin moved to Vancouver and wound up in the child welfare system, which she considers a modern-day extension of residential schools, and on the streets in the Downtown Eastside. After experiencing multiple traumas, she became a heavy drug user and later tested positive for HIV.

Months after discovering her HIV-status, Larkin was able to leave the streets and settled in Victoria, on unceded Coast Salish territory. Over the past decade she has spent much of her time doing advocacy work in the medical system and is co-chair of a group of women that created the first Aboriginal Women’s HIV and AIDS Strategy in Canada.

“Because of colonialism, our experience is very different, which is tied to not just violence but also residential school, and it’s intergenerational,” Larkin said.

Larkin now has two children of her own and has made a conscious effort to give them a better environment to grow up in than the one she had.

"I don't have a lot of connection with my community and culture, and I think that's how it's impacted me directly, and my children, and my family,” she said. “I tell my children what I can, what I know."

The idea that Canadians need to change the way they think about Aboriginal people’s history and experience is one that the commission emphasizes.

"In talking about residential schools and their legacy, we are not talking about an Aboriginal problem, but a Canadian problem," reads the commission's 2012 report. "It is not simply a dark chapter from our past. It was integral to the making of Canada. Although the schools are no longer in operation, the last ones did not close until the 1990s. The colonial framework of which they were a central element has not been dismantled."

The commission was created through the ratification of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in 2007. It was a result of residential school survivors launching the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history against the government, churches and individual school staff for the abuses they endured.

The agreement also established a nominal “common experience payment” for all students who attended the 134 schools and residences identified in the deal, as basic compensation for the people’s sufferings under the residential school system.

But there are many survivors who feel dissatisfied by the compensation offered. Perry Omeasoo, a Cree residential school survivor, told the commission that he was raised by his grandparents as a young child. After his mother’s prior residential school experience, she was unable to parent him and was mostly absent throughout his life.

"It was almost nothing,” Omeasoo said of the compensation payment at a Commissioner Sharing Panel. "I would have rather had my mother. And for that, I will always be resentful."

Not only do some survivors not find the payment healing, but the forms that survivors had to fill out to qualify for payment triggered mental breakdowns in some.

"Amazing how sheets of paper can be so re-traumatizing," said Kat Norris, a Salish residential school survivor and the spokesperson for Indigenous Action Movement. "I had previously gone through years of counselling, so I assumed I was going to be fine. Instead, I totally backtracked, put it on the shelf, and went into a depression."

Norris is a survivor of the Kuper Island Residential School, which she calls the “Alcatraz of residential schools.” She was sent to the school with her two younger brothers and her sister, as young children. When they arrived at the school in the evening, her brothers were taken away from her, straight out of her hands, because of the strict gender segregation.

"The common thread we survivors share is sibling separation," she said.

"It's one of the biggest painful memories of my whole life, seeing them both walking down the hall, looking back at me, not knowing where they were going and I couldn’t do anything," continued Norris. "We only learned, as adults, about how much we all suffered at that school."

There are diverse opinions about the 2008 statement of apology among residential school survivors and other Indigenous people, Norris said. She herself expresses mixed reactions.

“For me, it acknowledged our Indigenous Holocaust," Norris said. "Immediately, I felt I could breathe, I felt free. And it's because our experience was acknowledged."

At the same time, she explained, “it isn't enough. It is a token apology, trinkets, again, from a government that continues to barrage our people with ingenious legislation bent on keeping our land and destroying it forever. It is felt that we can simply be paid off and silenced forever. Realistically, our pain carries on throughout our lives, as shown by intergenerational impact.”

Norris is planning to give a statement of her own experiences at the commission’s national event in Vancouver next year.

While statement-gathering and outreach activities are ongoing across the country, the commission also has several national events left in its mandate: June 21 to 24, 2012, in Saskatoon; September 18 to 21, 2013, in Vancouver; yet-to-be-determined dates and locations in Quebec and Alberta; and a closing Ceremony in Ottawa.

"We know that the damage continues," Commissioner Justice Sinclair told those gathered at the event in Victoria. "In two years this commission will no longer be around, but this conversation must continue."

Sandra Cuffe is a freelance journalist and researcher currently based in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territory. She hopes to make it to Saskatoon in June.

IRSSS

Residential School Survivors Share Their Stories

Tim McSorley — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:19:18 +0000

Truth and Reconciliation Commission hears testimonials at Eskasoni

ESKASONI, NOVA SCOTIA—Truth can be an ugly thing.

It was to hear some ugly truths that people gathered in Eskasoni on Friday, October 14 for a session of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The commission is holding hearings on Indian Residential Schools across Canada. The Canadian government supported more than 130 such schools for over a century, during which they were run by a variety of Christian churches. These schools took children from their parents at a young age for the explicit purpose of destroying First Nations cultures, languages and ways of life.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission invited anyone involved in or affected by the residential schools to make a presentation. Most of the speakers were survivors who attended the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, which was the only such school in Atlantic Canada. It was in operation from 1923 to 1967.

Benji Lafford, a survivor from Eskasoni, spoke about being taken to the train station by uniformed government officials at the age of six.

“I was an ordinary child,” he said. “I went to school in Eskasoni for a while. I didn’t understand anything about the English language at the time. Mostly we were speaking Mi’kmaq. When my dad was alive, he taught us in Mi’kmaq. We chopped wood, we would get water, we would make sure everything would be okay for the next day so we wouldn’t be hungry or cold for the winter. As a young boy, I didn’t understand why they took me away from my homeland and from parents.”

Lafford and his brothers and sisters were all sent to the residential school. He said that as a child he wondered what he did wrong.

“I know now that we didn’t do anything wrong because we were innocent,” he said. “We stopped at almost every train station. We saw a lot of Native children standing on the side of platform. There were no families, no relatives, no uncles, grandfathers, nobody to say goodbye to them. No hugs. There were a lot of children crying.”

Upon arrival at the school, the children were met by the nuns and priests who ran it. The boys and girls were separated. They had their clothes taken away and their heads shaved.

“They scrubbed us so hard, trying to take the Indian away from us,” he said. “They said, you have no parents to come and help you. You have no grandparents to help you.”

He said he recalls, in later years, little boys crying as they approached the big red school, and as an older boy, he knew there was no way to help them.

“Once we got locked up behind those closed doors, no turning back. No turning back at all. You can’t run away because they always bring you back,” he said.

The children were not allowed to speak the Mi’kmaq language. Any violations of the rules were punished harshly.

“If you said a word wrong, you were going to get hit on the head, boom! Say your prayers right. Kneel down right,” he said. “We’d get hit on the head when we were saying the rosary at night. After an hour, our kneecaps would get sore.”

One rule was that children were not allowed to go to the bathroom after 10:00 pm. Lafford said he became a bed-wetter as a result and was forced to carry his soiled bedclothes on his head through the cafeteria at breakfast every time it happened.

“They strapped us almost every night,” he said. “Bend down and touch your toes. Take your pants off.”

He described it as “just like being in a cell.” Punishments also included being locked in cupboards. He described being slapped for speaking Mi’kmaq. His mother died while he was at the school, and he remembers being yelled at for crying in bed after he found out.

“Life went by, days went by, years went by,” he said. “I hope to my creator that things like that will never happen to anybody else. It was hard to let go of things that you loved. It’s not easy to be a child and to grow up in a different world. It’s not easy to walk with your head up when your head is down.”

Lafford attended the residential school until it closed in 1967. He finished his schooling in Toronto, and considered staying there, but decided to return to Cape Breton.

“I went back to my community, where I belong, where I can speak my language, to be with my family, my uncles, my aunties, my cousins, my friends,” he said. "That’s where I wanted to be.”

His experiences at the residential school continued to affect him. He said he drank and used drugs when he got older, often ending up in jail. He had difficulty with jobs and relationships. He said he thought about suicide at times. But then everything changed.

“I became a dancer,” he said, “a traditional dancer. I love that powwow music. I like the sound of the drum. I like the sound of the people singing. My life changed. I respect myself, I honour myself and I love myself, who I am today.”

Grand Chief Ben Sylliboy from Waycobah also spoke about his experiences at the residential school, which he attended for four years, starting in 1947. He was six years old and attended with his two sisters.

“My mother ended up with TB in ‘47,” he said. “We were put into the residential school. During that time, there was a thing called centralization, where the people from Whycocomagh were forced to go to Eskasoni to live here. There were nine families that remained in Waycobah, one of which was my parents. We had everything. We had our own farm. My father worked. The only problem was, my father couldn’t look after us. So we ended up going to Shubie.”

He recalls being forced to speak English.

“The only language we knew was Mi’kmaq,” he said. “Being put in an environment where you didn’t know the language, it was a difficult thing. I couldn’t even ask to go to the washroom.”

He said the school officials told the children they would never amount to anything.

“They said, the only good Indian is a dead Indian,” he said. “Even the nuns told me that. That hurt everybody.”

He said the boys in the school stuck together, becoming comrades. But the boys were kept strictly separated from the girls.

“The hardest part was, you weren’t allowed to talk to your sisters,” said Sylliboy. "I would have liked to have a little 15 minutes together. But we weren’t even allowed.”

He said when their parents visited, the visit was supervised by a nun, and they were only allowed to speak English. Letters home were also dictated by the nuns, with the children all writing the same thing that was written on the board.

“That’s how we communicated with our parents,” he said. “We couldn’t tell them what was really going on, the beatings we’d take.”

In the winter, children were sent outside regardless of the circumstances.

“I remember one time I had a sore stomach,” he said. “Diarrhea. I knocked on the door and knocked on the door. They wouldn’t open the door for me. So I dirtied myself. Eventually a nun came to the door. She said, what’s wrong? I said, I’ve got a sore stomach. She said, you shouldn’t knock on the door. She banged my hand on the door until you could see the bruises. Here, you can see the scar. That remained with me for 66 years.”

After four years, his mother recovered, and he was able to go home. He contracted tuberculosis and spent four years in hospitals. He credits the elders, including Caroline Gould, with helping him re-learn the Mi’kmaq language and reconnect with Mi’kmaq traditions.

Georgina Doucette of Eskasoni said leaving the residential school was also difficult.

“Coming back into my community,” she said, “I felt as if I didn’t belong. Even my grandmother said of my brother and I when we went to stay with her, she told her friends, you know these children who come out of that school, they’re not right in the head. Those were words from my own grandmother. We no longer spoke the language, we no longer had that connection with family because we separated for so long. We didn’t belong in the White world, and we didn’t belong in our community.”

She said it took her a long time to cope with her experiences, and she turned to liquor at a young age.

“I passed on that legacy to my children,” she said. “When I sobered up 24 years ago, I looked at them. And I kept apologizing. I feel deep down, this is the road I set for my children, with alcoholism. And their children drink and do drugs. I feel very guilty. It’s hard to shake that guilt when you’ve carried it for so long.”

She said she was unable to talk about the residential school for a long time.

“I never talked about the residential school because I had nothing good to say,” she said. “I never told my children stories of what happened to me. It’s hard for me to try and forgive, but I know deep down I have to forgive myself first.”

She said she is still on a journey of healing, which started with a family powwow and a return to traditional ways.

“The revival of our culture was really needed,” she said. “I’m proud of how far we’ve come, and I know we have a long ways to go. The whole community has to get together. That’s the only way we can get through it, talk about it, cry and move on.”

Margaret (Sylliboy) Poulette of Waycobah went to the residential school at the age of four. She remembers some fun times, such as going swimming in a nearby lake, but even those memories have a sad side to them. She spoke of making herself a doll out of a cleaning cloth, and having the toys sent by her parents taken away by the nuns to be given to an orphanage.

She said she can barely remember a time before the residential school because she was so young when she went there. She says she does recall waiting for her dad to come and get her and take her home.

“You know at night when a car comes up and the light goes round the room,” she said. “That night a car came up and the light went round. I thought it would be him.”

Children were assigned English names and numbers at the school.

“My number was 54,” said Poulette. “I’ve seen a lot of abuse in the classroom. They picked on people who had darker skin.”

She recalled a blind girl being strapped for not being able to read, and a boy who stuttered having his mouth held open by a stick all day. Another boy was punished by having to wear a dress and have the other children feel the bones of his head where the nuns said “his horns were coming out.” Another girl spilled milk and was strapped for it until her hands turned blue. Children who tried to run away were punished by having their heads shaved. Children who vomited at meals were forced to eat the vomit.

She said they did celebrate holidays, such as Christmas.

“I remember making streamers for decorating,” she said, “but Santa never found us there.”

Commissioner Wilton Littlechild said a lot of the stories resonated with his own experiences as a boy attending a residential school on the Prairies. The commission is visiting First Nations communities across the country collecting such accounts.

Prime minister Stephen Harper apologized to residential school survivors on behalf of the Canadian government in 2008.

“I didn’t accept his apology, to be honest with you,” said Benji Lafford, “because it didn’t come from the heart. Someone just wrote that on a paper and said, read that to the survivors of the Indian Residential Schools to ease their pain. A lot of survivors never got to ease their pain.”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission came out with a court settlement with residential school survivors in 2006.

Commissioner Marie Wilson said the commission aims to share these stories with all Canadians.

“We think it’s non-Native people who don’t know the story, but very often it is also the Aboriginal children and grandchildren who have never been told these stories,” she said. “They don’t have a context for why things have been the way they have been. I think it’s an extremely important transference of knowledge to share that.”

This article was originally published by the Inverness Oran. Read also Joyce MacDonald's column on the subject of truth and reconciliaion.

Chief Sylliboy

Margaret Poulette

From Memory to Resistance, Children Bear Witness

Moira Peters — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:33:34 +0000

HIJOS celebrates 10 years in Guatemala

TATAMAGOUCHE, NS–Walking through the streets of Guatemala City, HIJOS slogans are hard to miss: "Justice for Nueva Linda"; "Trial and Punishment for Military Assassins!" Words demanding an end to impunity remind everyone that 36 years of civil war in Guatemala have not ended in justice or peace.

HIJOS Guatemala—Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence—was founded in 1999 by young people who were forced into exile, or who lost family members due to State repression during the war. (The group's name, HIJOS, is a play on the Spanish word for "children.") In June 2009, HIJOS Guatemala celebrated 10 years of fighting to preserve historical memory, to end impunity, to memorialize the victims of the war, and to shed light on the human rights violations committed during the conflict.

Using public education events, protests, and political art and murals to articulate and strengthen the movement toward justice, HIJOS is comprised of students, workers and professionals of Ladinos (Guatemalans of mixed Hispanic and Indigenous origin) and Indigenous descent. A new generation of HIJOS is now being born as those who started the group 10 years ago pass on to their hijos the struggle of those before them. HIJOS members—including children of the disappeared and murdered, and Guatemalans who stand in solidarity with the group—work in rural communities as well as in the urban centre of Guatemala City. While many group members hold "day jobs" with other human rights and social justice organizations, they are more than simply volunteers for HIJOS; for many, HIJOS is a way of life, an extended family.

HIJOS not only focuses on justice for past crimes, but also draws attention to new threats Guatemalans face today. In a recent bulletin, HIJOS stated: "According to our interpretation of the history and the memory of the resistance of the People, we understand justice to be a historical demand of the grassroots struggle for dignity, sovereignty and self-determination."

Bety Reyes Toledo knows HIJOS well. Reyes Toledo is the daughter of Hector Reyes, a Guatemalan peasant who, after trying to organize workers and obtaining evidence of back-door dealings involving the owners of the Nueva Linda plantation where he worked, was kidnapped and disappeared on September 5, 2003. Reyes Toledo, her family, and over 170 other families have been camped on the side of the road outside the plantation since 2004, demanding justice and information on the whereabouts of her father.

"HIJOS has been with us throughout our struggle and because of them, more people have become involved. They help give us the strength to go on because we feel supported," said Reyes Toledo. HIJOS, in collaboration with other social justice organizations, has arranged food and clothing drives, the "Caravan for Justice" on the anniversary of the disappearance of Hector Reyes and protests to support justice for the Reyes family and all families and workers at Nueva Linda.

But not everyone is happy with HIJOS’ call for an end to impunity. The group has experienced threats and acts of intimidation, including office break-ins and an attempted kidnapping. Members of HIJOS have been victims of political campaigns and attacked through the Guatemalan media. According to a June 2008 "Urgent Action" (a call to action sent to HIJOS' national and international solidarity networks), one member was followed, beaten up on the street and warned to tell others to back off a public demilitarization campaign that involved HIJOS and 15 other organizations, or suffer the consequences.

The group continued its work and 2008 marked the first year the military parade was suspended from its annual June 30 march through Guatemala’s historic centre.

"For HIJOS Guatemala, who have been going out into the streets...to point out [and] to reject the criminal presence of the army and its high command which acts in total impunity, the suspension of the parade is a victory that has been won thanks to the people who year after year have marched in light of threats, attacks and repression," said Wendy Mendez, a human rights defender and co-founder of HIJOS Guatemala.

In fact, HIJOS' June 30 anniversary falls on the same day as Guatemala's annual military parade—a day now known, thanks to the efforts of HIJOS and others, as the "Day of Heroes and Martyrs."

"Along the way we have learned that the struggle for memory, truth and justice in Guatemala is a long and historical process for the survivors of genocide, therefore it has many actions, strategies and chapters that must be written in order for those democratic principles to become a reality." Mendez said that stopping the Military March was one such action on the road to democracy and peace.

Born in Guatemala, Mendez and her family fled to Vancouver, B.C., after witnessing the forced disappearance of her mother, Luz Haydee Mendez, by the Guatemalan Military Intelligence on March 8, 1984.

Following its investigation between April 1997 and February 1999, the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH)—a commission created through the peace negotiations and the Accord of Oslo in 1994—reported that state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 per cent of the violations documented by the CEH, including 92 per cent of arbitrary executions and 91 per cent of forced disappearances. Victims included men, women and children of all social strata: workers, professionals, church members, politicians, peasants, students and academics; in ethnic terms, 80 per cent were Indigenous Maya. During the 36-year conflict, the CEH reported that over 200,000 men and women were killed or disappeared. Forced disappearance is a war tactic used to systematically terrorize a population. 626 villages were completely destroyed, 1.5 million people were displaced by the violence, and more than 150,000 were driven to seek refuge in Mexico.

Ten years after the release of the report, the numbers are estimated to be higher still as clandestine graves continue to be exhumed and those once unwilling to talk about la violencia have begun to open up and tell their stories.

To date, however, none of the intellectual authors of the war—including military high command and civilians in power during the violence in the early 1980s—have been tried, let alone convicted.

The recent presentation of the Guatemalan Presidential Peace Secretariat’s "Report on the Authenticity of the Military Diary" verified facts found in a military dossier detailing crimes committed by the military during the civil war. The dossier was smuggled from Guatemalan military intelligence files in 1999. Given the release of historical documents from the national policy archive that affirm these details, Mendez is disappointed with the Guatemalan government's unwillingness to act on its own findings. She reiterated the sentiment of those who continue to struggle for justice: "We do not need another study into the authenticity of the facts. We need a judicial investigation, trial and punishment for those responsible."

It has been 13 years since the state and the URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity) signed the Peace Accords for “true and lasting peace.” However, structures of exclusion, antagonism and conflict continue to oppress the majority of Guatemalans who suffer at the hands of an unwieldy and corrupt National Civil Police force, a so-called social democrat government with a neo-liberal trade agenda, corruption and weak state institutions. Above all, the power of the highly trained Guatemalan military continues to seep into and thus control all levels of Guatemalan society, provoking instability and fear throughout the country.

Mendez reflects upon the disturbing trend of increased violence in Guatemala: "At first we were certain that the wall of impunity would come down with the fulfillment of the Peace Treaties signed in 1996, but since these have not been respected by any of the governments since, and on top of that, the Free Trade Agreements' agenda and policies have been imposed, the reasons that gave origin to the war are still present and the levels of impunity and corruption have grown."

As crime levels surpass those reported during the war—of which 99 per cent go unpunished—and drug cartels control borders and entire communities, the military continues to move freely into rural communities. These are the same Indigenous communities wherein not long ago the state orchestrated massacres. The low-paid National Civil Police provide little civil security for Guatemalans, and in many cases they are not trusted due to their associations with the mafia. Practices include demanding bribery payments, brutal treatment of civilians and general abuse of power. In its desperation to reduce the high levels of crime, the population is turning to the military for protection.

On the other hand, thanks to a beefed-up military budget, military bases have been reopened and new ones have been created. In communities fighting to save their natural resources from transnational mega-projects, such as mines and dams that threaten to destroy the land and displace thousands of Indigenous people, the newly created "combined forces"—police-military patrols—are stationed to remind citizens that their moves are being watched and reported upon.

Mendez reflects on the work and struggle to which HIJOS has committed. "On our 10th anniversary, we confirm that the best way to bring honour and glory to our mothers and fathers, to all the victims of genocide in Guatemala, is to continue the struggle for social justice and democracy."

Jackie McVicar works with the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network (BTS) in Guatemala City. BTS has been supporting and collaborating with HIJOS initiatives for nine years.

HIJOS close up

HIJOS drums

Québec Native Women's Association responds to Harper's apology for residential schools

Anna Carastathis — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:34:47 +0000

Ellen Gabriel.jpg

The Québec Native Women's Association has called upon the Canadian government to acknowledge that residential schools were an act of genocide.

Statement by Quebec Native Women's Association/Femmes Autochtones du Québec

Re : Government of Canada's Residential School Apology
June 11, 2008, Kahnawake

Quebec Native Women recognizes the Prime Minister's official apology concerning the genocidal experience of Aboriginal people in the history of the Residential School system. While the apology to Aboriginal peoples is long overdue it is contradicted by the oppressive policies of the Indian
Act.

The heinous crimes committed against Aboriginal children who were victims and survivors of the Residential School experience must be dealt with beyond mere apologies and monetary compensation.