ADDENDUM::Canada’s Forced Schooling of Aboriginal Children Was ‘Cultural Genocide,’ Report Finds - The New York Times

“A just reconciliation requires more than simply talking about the need to heal the deep wounds of history,” the report said. “Words of apology alone are insufficient; concrete actions on both symbolic and material fronts are required.”

Justice Murray Sinclair

Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’ ”

That is the conclusion reached by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after six years of intensive research, including 6,750 interviews. The commission published a summary version on Tuesday of what will ultimately be a multivolume report, documenting widespread physical, cultural and sexual abuse at government-sponsored residential schools that Indian, Inuit and other indigenous children were forced to attend.

The schools, financed by the government but run largely by churches, were in operation for more than a century, from 1883 until the last one closed in 1998.

The commission documented that at least 3,201 students died while attending the schools, many because of mistreatment or neglect, in the first comprehensive tally of such deaths.

The report linked the abuses at the schools, which came to broad public attention over the last four decades, to social, health, economic and emotional problems affecting many indigenous Canadians today. It concluded that although some teachers and administrators at the schools were well intentioned, the overriding motive for the program was economic, not educational.

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A principal recommendation is a step that has long been a sore point between aboriginal groups and the government. The report repeatedly calls on the government to fully adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the basis of a new relationship.

Canada, along with the United States, Australia and New Zealand, has been reluctant to take that step, saying instead that the country endorses the declaration only as a “non-legally-binding aspirational document.”

The major sticking point is the declaration’s requirement that issues involving the lands, territories and resources of aboriginal people be subject to their “prior and informed consent.” The government is concerned that the requirement would essentially give aboriginal groups a sweeping veto over Canadian law.

The commission said, however, that the declaration affirmed rights already held by native groups under treaties with the government and was consistent with recent decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada related to aboriginal rights.

Canada’s Forced Schooling of Aboriginal Children Was ‘Cultural Genocide,’ Report Finds - The New York Times