By Laurence Butet-Roch
Mike
Pinay, Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School, 1953 to 1963. “It was the
worst ten years of my life,” he says. “I was away from my family from
the age of six to sixteen. How do you learn about relationships, how do
you learn about family? I didn’t know what love was. We weren’t even
known by names back then. I was a number.”
CreditPhotograph by Daniella Zalcman
Throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Canada sought
to forcibly assimilate aboriginal youngsters by removing them from
their homes and placing them in federally funded boarding schools that
prohibited the expression of native traditions or languages. Known as
Indian Residential Schools, the institutions, which were often
administered by churches, provided neither proper education nor adequate
nutrition, health care, or clothing, and many of the students who
passed through the system—an estimated hundred and fifty thousand
children from the First Nation, Inuit, and Métis peoples—suffered abuse.
The country has in recent years begun to reckon with the consequences
of its policy. A report released earlier this year by a Canadian Truth
and Reconciliation Commission described what happened in the schools
as “cultural genocide.”...Continue reading...
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