After those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Francis’ trip to Canada promises to be historic. On his arrival in Alberta (center of the country) on July 24, the pope will visit the site of the boarding school for natives of Ermineskin, near the regional capital Edmonton. On this cursed place, he will meet the survivors of one of these schools of “forced assimilation”, this national policy in force from 1831 to 1996. And will pronounce the official apologies of the Catholic Church. “I feel shame, pain and dishonor at the role that certain Catholics have played in everything that has hurt you, in the abuses, the lack of respect for your identity and your culture”, declared the sovereign pontiff last April at the Vatican, in the presence of a delegation of Inuit, Métis and First Nations peoples. “With all my heart, I am truly sorry,” added the octogenarian pope in fragile health.
For almost two centuries, 150,000 Inuit, Iroquois, Mohawk, Cree and Algonquin children – the communities present on the vast Canadian territory 8,000 years before the arrival of the French in the 16th century and the British in the 18th century – are educated in these so-called “residential” schools. In 1920, the Canadian government amended the “Indian Act” to make attendance at these boarding schools compulsory, the management of which was ensured by the Catholic and Anglican churches. “These schools were one of the instruments of acculturation aimed at transforming into good little Canadians these native children considered as savages”, explains the anthropologist Marie-Pierre Bouquet, specialist in the subject, at the University of Montreal.
Elizabeth II receives Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at Windsor Castle
afp.com/Steve Parsons
Originally from northern Quebec, Algonquin Richard Kistabish was six years old when a priest accompanied by a policeman from the Royal Gendarmerie showed up at his parents’ house. We are in 1950. Like every summer, the nomadic family, after spending the winter in their hunting territory in the far north of Canada, has just pitched a tent by the river in the small town of Amos. “They just told us, ‘We’re going to visit the school,'” recalls the 72-year-old Native American. About twenty children climb aboard a truck, heading for the Saint-Marc-de-Figuery boarding school, which has just opened its doors a few kilometers away. In the most remote regions of the country, horse-drawn carriages, buses and even seaplanes are chartered to tear thousands of children from their families. Richard, the new boarder, will stay ten years without seeing his parents.
“The nightmare started on the first night,” he continues. Shaved hair, showered and scrubbed as if to whiten the color of his skin, dressed in a European uniform far removed from his traditional leather outfit, he also had to get used to a new diet. “The smell of bacon made my heart ache for years!” he recalls. The process of depersonalization is relentless. Children lose their first name in favor of a number. Speaking their native language is prohibited. They must memorize phrases in an unknown language: French. Very quickly, the first slaps fall. “Being beaten for what we were, uneducated Indians who had to be civilized: even today I find it difficult to get rid of this fear”, admits Richard Kistabish.
Responsible for the boarding school, the priests and sisters of the congregation of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate – an order founded in France in 1816 – multiply psychological and sometimes physical abuse. Four of Richard Kistabish’s brothers and sisters, also boarders, claim to have suffered sexual abuse in the confessional of the chapel which adjoined the school, now destroyed. In recent years, a handful of Catholic priests have been tried and sentenced for “pedophilia” in Canada. Dozens of others, denounced by their alleged victims, are peacefully enjoying their retirement.
Segregation and stigmatization are established as state policy. Women are victims of forced sterilization campaigns. In public transport, the “Whites” are separated from the “Indians”, who do not enjoy the same civic rights. The natives had to wait until 1971 to benefit from the right to vote. To eradicate indigenous peoples and cultures, minors are particularly targeted, with a single objective: “Kill the Indian in the heart of the child”, according to the terrible expression that defines the policy of the time.
The first testimonies emerged and, in 1991, Canada set up a Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples in order to put an end to abuse and mistreatment. In 2008, a “Truth and Reconciliation” commission conducted thousands of hearings with survivors. His conclusions are damning: these schools were the instrument of “cultural genocide”. The same year, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper broke the taboo by uttering the long-awaited words: “We regret”. Apologies reiterated by the current head of government (liberal) Justin Trudeau, upon taking office in 2015.
Last fall, the latter instituted a “National Day of Tribute to the Victims”, every September 30. This decision follows the trauma of the discovery, in the spring of 2021, of 215 graves of unidentified children – some were not four years old – near a former boarding school in British Columbia. The deaths had never been declared by the religious authorities… Since then, other research carried out using geolocated radars has uncovered nearly a thousand clandestine burials. To date, 6,000 indigenous children are still missing.
The traumas are perpetuated from generation to generation. Yesterday’s parents cannot forgive themselves for letting their children go. And the children live with “the ashamed to be themselves“, instilled by the missionaries. As for their descendants, they lose themselves in a quest for identity made impossible by the erasure of their culture.
Françoise Ruperthouse, from the Anishinabe community, recounts decades of domestic violence against her, suicide attempts and addiction to drugs and alcohol. To the suffering endured in the boarding school she attended when she was a little girl was added another tragedy: the disappearance in the 1950s of two of her brothers and sisters who were taken away from a very young age by the medical authorities. in order to be treated outside their territory. The toddlers never came back. One was found in a mass grave; the other was sent to a psychiatric hospital hundreds of kilometers from her home, without her parents ever being informed. “They were consumed by guilt, when they were victims and their children had been stolen from them”, indignantly the sixty-year-old. “I live with this past every day.” which does not pass.