Protesters demand probe on school deaths
Montreal: Hundreds of protesters in Canada’s capital called for a probe into a boarding school system for indigenous children, as outrage built after the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at several of the facilities.
Until the 1990s, some 150,000 indigenous, Inuit and Metis youths were forcibly enrolled in the schools, where students were physically and sexually abused by teachers who stripped them of their culture and language.
“Indigenous Peoples need truth and justice,” MP Mumilaaq Qaqqaq wrote on social media.
“That means a special prosecutor and a fully-funded independent investigation, with international observers present, into Canada’s crimes against Indigenous Peoples,” she added, calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Justice Minister David Lametti “to stop making excuses” and launch a probe.
The demonstrators gathered on Parliament Hill in Ottawa after two lawmakers from the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) called for a protest.
“People have been shocked by the number of graves that have been found. These are not accidents, these are not tragedies. They represent a policy that was about the destruction of a people,” NDP lawmaker Charlie Angus said.
Since May, more than 1,000 unmarked graves were found near former residential schools, which have outraged the country.
Meanwhile, more than 100 people marched from Onondaga Nation to downtown Syracuse, to honour the indigenous children who were taken from their communities and forced into schools that focused on assimilation.
The marchers left toys, flowers and children’s shoes at a statue of Christopher Columbus to commemorate the children who did not survive the schools.
Dressed in orange to support the Every Child Matters movement, they also acknowledged the trauma that these schools caused.
“My mother came back from the boarding schools, she never hugged me,” said Tadodaho Sidney Hill, leader of the Onondaga Nation.
“I guess that’s what they taught her in that school.”
US Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in June the government will look into its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and lasting consequences” of policies that over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families.
Earlier this month, the disinterred remains of nine Native American children who died more than a century ago while attending a state-run school in Pennsylvania were sent home to Rosebud Sioux tribal lands in South Dakota. Virgil Brave Rock, 62, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, spoke of his experiences at St Mary’s Residential School in Alberta, Canada.
He described being forced to live at the school where children were stripped of their names and given an assigned number.
“I am 266,” he said. Bishop Douglas Lucia of the Diocese of Syracuse told marchers he felt the need to apologise and condemned the Church’s actions.
“Part of my being with you today,” he said, “is simply to stand with you and weep.”