the painful memory of indigenous children

‘I invite you to come to Canada to apologize to residential school survivors’. It was during one of his visits to the Vatican that Wilton Littlechild invited the Pope to visit Canada. This aboriginal lawyer is a residential school survivor. Like him, many of them expect a lot from this visit. “Once there is apology and forgiveness, then people will start to feel a sense of healing.”

The history of these Catholic boarding schools reserved for Aboriginals, the first inhabitants of Canada, begins in the 19th century. Children are separated from their families, no longer have the right to speak their languages ​​or practice their customs. Violence, rape and disease wreak havoc among children. At least 4,000 children are believed to have lost their lives there. “It was an institution for the torture of human beings, the spirits of children“, says Elisapie, an Inuk artist. In May 2021, the remains of 215 children were found on this site, a former boarding school in British Columbia. A discovery that shocked an entire country. In the space of a century, 150,000 children were torn from their families. An educational policy qualified as cultural genocide by a commission of inquiry in 2015.