Pope Francis is scheduled to visit Canada to formally apologise for the crimes committed by Catholic-run residential schools across the country. The Pope is scheduled to visit the country during the upcoming week. Notably, multiple unmarked mass graves of native children have been found in Canada around the old buildings of Catholic-run residential schools.
The 85-years-old Pontifex called the visit a “pilgrimage of penance”. In a statement, he said he hoped his visit would help heal the wrongs done to the indigenous people by the Roman Catholic Church in the country. He is scheduled to visit the provinces of Quebec, Alberta, and Nunavut. However, he will not visit British Columbia, where around 200 unmarked graves were discovered last year.
In recent years, Canada is said to be on the path of ‘reconciliation’ to repair the relationship between indigenous people, the non-indigenous population, and the government. The Church has been facing a lot of heat since 2015 when Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) highlighted the abuses suffered by the survivors of Catholic Residential Schools in its report.
It was revealed that those government-funded schools were part of the policy to destroy indigenous cultures and languages and to ‘assimilate’ the indigenous children. During the period these schools operated, around 1,50,000 children belonging to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit families were taken away and placed in those schools. There were around 130 such schools, and 70 percent of them were managed by Roman Catholic Church. The last such school closed down in 1996.
In the report, TRC mentioned how the students were subjected to malnutrition, abuse, and illness. The Committee called the school system a central element of a policy of “cultural genocide”. The ‘Call To Action’ section in the report had called for a formal apology from the Pope.
Last year in May, unmarked graves of children were found at a former school site in Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, a First Nations community in British Columbia. The researchers used ground-penetrating radar technology to find the graves. The discovery sent shockwaves not only in Canada but across the world. Following the discovery, other locations were searched, and since then, over 1,000 such graves have been found.
The discoveries resulted in more intense calls for an apology from the Pope by the indigenous leaders. In April this year, an indigenous delegation visited the Vatican, where Pope apologised to them for the ‘pain and shame’ residential schools had caused. At that time, he had promised to meet the indigenous communities in Canada and provide support for reconciliation efforts.
The Pope will be in Canada till July 29. His visit is seen as a significant step towards reconciliation. However, he is being criticised for not including Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc in his visit despite a formal invitation. However, the Church officials said they have planned the trip while keeping Pope’s health in mind. He has been wheelchair-bound since May this year.
It is noteworthy that the indigenous people of Canada have been seeking accountability from the Church for the pain and suffering brought by it to indigenous people. Crystal Gail Fraser, a Gwichyà Gwich’in assistant professor of history and native studies at the University of Alberta, believes that the recent discovery of mass graves is one of the biggest reasons that Pope is travelling to Canada. In a statement, she said she was looking for more than just an apology. She said, “Like many other times in Canadian history, we have seen apologies come and go. So for me, I’m going to be looking for the actions of the Catholic Church next.” According to her, compensation for survivors and documents of former staff and clergy that operated the school should be released.
Indigenous children, mass graves, and the Church-backed residential school system
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), a large number of indigenous children that attended residential schools never made it back to their home communities. Some children ran away while others died at the schools. These students are now called the “Missing Children”.
The Missing Children Project documents the deaths and burial sites of such children who died while attending the residential schools. So far, the project has identified over 4,100 children who died while attending a residential school.
On May 27 last year, Rosanne Casimir, Chief of Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 confirmed that the remains of 215 children were found at the premises of Kamloops Indian Residential School.
In the official statement, Casimir said, “We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths.” He further added that some of the students were as young as three years old when they died. “
About 751 graves were found in Saskatchewan on June 24, 2021. Two weeks later on July 12, the Penelakut tribe informed that it had discovered 160 unmarked graves in the Southern Gulf Islands in the British Columbia province of Canada.
The unmarked graves are a testimony of a painful past where the government and Christian churches inflicted atrocities on the native population. As anger and pain spread among the First Nation people, five churches built on Indigenous land were burnt down.
In a report published in 2015 after a six-year investigation into the now-defunct system, it was termed as “cultural genocide”. The report documented horrific details of abuse, rape, malnutrition, and other atrocities suffered by the students who attended the schools. As many as 150,000 were known to have attended the school system between the 1840s and 1990s.
