Graves in the Ermineskin Cemetery in Maskwacis.
(Photo: Cole Burston/AFP)
There were 215 children. The youngest was just three years old. Dumped in an anonymous mass grave, buried like cattle, in the backyard of what was once a Catholic boarding school in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. In May 2021, these children’s bodies were found during soil investigations. Just a month later, in June, more than 750 anonymous graves were discovered on the site of the former Catholic boarding school in Marieval, Saskatchewan.
The state and the church acted in an ominous alliance in Canada when they snatched tens of thousands of indigenous children from their families in the 19th and 20th centuries in order to raise them in so-called “residential schools” to become “civilized Christians”. According to survivors, this Christian upbringing meant for the children not only the loss of their mother tongue and their cultural identity, but also brutal abuse, including torture, psychological violence and sexual abuse. Many children never returned.
For a long time nobody wanted to listen to the indigenous population when they talked about their lost children. It was only after her persistent pressure that the first soil investigations finally took place. To date, around 130,000 graves have been found across the country.
Pope Francis has been in Canada since Sunday, on a “journey of penitence,” as he says himself. Late Monday evening German time, he visited the grounds of one of the largest notorious residential schools in Maskwacis. “I humbly ask forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the indigenous peoples,” he told survivors of such schools. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was among the 2,000 in attendance. Francis recalled what survivors had told him: how “your languages and cultures were denigrated and oppressed; how children were abused physically and verbally, psychologically and spiritually; how they were taken away from their homes from an early age”. Therefore, according to the Pope, “the Church kneels before God and asks forgiveness for the sins of her children”.
At the airport in Edmonton, the Pope was greeted by representatives of the so-called First Nations, the Inuit and the Métis. Some of them were still placed in Catholic “Residential Schools” in their childhood.
Expectations of the pontiff are high. At the end of March, representatives of the First Nations, the Inuit and the Métis traveled to the Vatican and met the Pope. At that time, Francis asked forgiveness for the actions of the Catholic Church. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is a Catholic himself and has made the issue a top priority, also demanded an apology from the Pope. Francis’ current trip to Canada is therefore at least considered a political success for the liberal government in Ottawa, which has made reconciliation with the indigenous peoples its cause.
Important files are locked away in Rome
Asking for forgiveness in Rome was a first step, but survivors want more: a genuine apology, face-to-face on Canadian soil. Above all, those affected are demanding financial compensation and the criminal prosecution of perpetrators who are still alive. For example, a priest who is said to have abused Inuit children in Nunavut in northern Canada lives unmolested to this day and is almost 90 years old in southern France.
In 2006, survivors brought 50 church entities to court in Canada in a class action lawsuit. The Catholic Church was then obliged to pay $25 million, but according to lawyer Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Dialogue Center for the History of Residential Schools at the University of Vancouver, church officials largely waived this obligation and only paid four million dollars.
Those affected also demand that the files on the schools should be released in order to be able to find other possible mass graves and to be able to work through the mistreatment. Many schools were run by religious orders, by Jesuits, Franciscans or Ursulines. Their files are in their respective headquarters in Rome. Incidentally, the Pope’s trip is also being followed with particular attention in the USA: There, too, there were numerous residential schools for indigenous children run by Christian missionaries. A first report by the US Department of the Interior in May already mentions at least 500 deaths at 19 schools.