Pope apologises for ‘evil’ done to Canadian Indigenous school survivors

Pope Francis apologised yesterday to Canada’s native people on their land for the Catholic Church’s role in schools where indigenous children were abused, branding forced cultural assimilation a “deplorable evil” and “disastrous error”.Speaking near the site of two former schools in Maskwacis, in Alberta, Francis went even further, apologising for Christian support of the overall “colonising mentality” of the times and calling for a “serious investigation” of the schools to assist survivors and descendants in healing.“With shame and unambiguously, I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the indigenous peoples,” the Pope said in the town, whose name means “hills of the bear” in the Cree language.The plea from the leader of the world’s 1.3bn Catholics was met with applause by a crowd of First Nations, Metis and Inuit people in Maskwacis, in western Alberta province – some of whom were taken from their families as children in what has been branded a “cultural genocide”.The 85-year-old Pope, who is still using a wheelchair and cane because of a fractured knee, is making the week-long apology tour of Canada to fulfil a promise that he made to indigenous delegations that visited him earlier this year at the Vatican, where he made the initial apology.Indigenous leaders wearing eagle-feather war headdresses greeted the Pope as a fellow chief and welcomed him with chanting, drum beating, dancing and war songs.“I am here because the first step of my penitential pilgrimage among you is that of again asking forgiveness, of telling you once more that I am deeply sorry,” he said.He was addressing the indigenous groups in the Bear Park Pow-Wow Grounds, part of the ancestral territory of the Cree, Dene, Blackfoot, Saulteaux and Nakota Sioux people.“Sorry for the ways in which, regrettably, many Christians supported the colonising mentality of the powers that oppressed the indigenous peoples. I am sorry,” he said during the meeting with First Nations, Metis and Inuit people. “In the face of this deplorable evil, the church kneels before God and implores his forgiveness for the sins of her children.”As he spoke, the emotion was palpable in Maskwacis, an Indigenous community south of provincial capital Edmonton which was the site of the Ermineskin residential school until it closed in 1975.Several hundred people, many in traditional clothing, were in attendance, along with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mary Simon, the country’s first Indigenous governor general.Many lowered their eyes, wiped away tears or leaned on and hugged neighbours, and Indigenous leaders afterwards placed a traditional feathered headdress on the Pope.“The place where we are gathered renews within me the deep sense of pain and remorse that I have felt in these past months,” Francis said, citing the “physical, verbal, psychological and spiritual abuse” of children over the course of decades.Counsellors were waiting near teepees set up to provide support to those who may need it, and earlier volunteers had distributed small paper bags for the “collection of tears”.“The First Nation believes that if you cry, you cry love, you catch the tears on a piece of paper and put it back in this bag,” explained Andre Carrier of the Manitoba Metis Federation, before the Pope spoke.Volunteers will collect the bags and later they will be burned with a special prayer, “to return the tears of love to the creator”, he said.Between 1881 and 1996, more than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and brought to residential schools.Many children were starved, beaten and sexually abused in a system that Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide”.“I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities co-operated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools,” the Pope said.The discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former residential school in British Columbia last year brought the issue to the fore again.Since then, the suspected remains of hundreds more children have been detected at other former residential schools around the country.A red banner with names of missing children was carried before the Pope.Wallace Yellowface, 78, a boarding school survivor from Pikanni Nation Reserve in Southern Alberta, said that the Pope’s message was too little, too late for him.“It’s late for an apology, and I don’t think it will do me much good,” he said, adding that he was still trying to find out what happened to his sister, who also attended a residential school.“It means a lot to me” that he came, said Deborah Greyeyes, 71, a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, the largest Indigenous group in Canada.“I think we have to forgive, too, at some point,” she told AFP.But “a lot of stuff was taken away from us”.Before making his address, Francis, sitting in a wheelchair, prayed in a field of crosses in the cemetery of the Our Lady of Seven Sorrows indigenous Catholic parish and passed by a stone memorial to the two residential schools once in the area.Survivors and leaders of indigenous communities say that they want more than an apology.They also want financial compensation, the return of artefacts sent to the Vatican by missionaries, support in bringing an alleged abuser now living in France to justice and the release of records held by the religious orders that ran the schools.Some also have called for the Catholic Church to renounce 15th-century papal bulls, or edicts, that justified colonial powers taking away indigenous land.Francis called for “a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered”.In January, the Canadian government agreed to pay C$40bn ($31.5bn) to compensate First Nations children who were taken from their families.The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops promised to raise C$30mn for healing, culture and language revitalisation and other initiatives.The fund has raised C$4.6mn so far.