20 February 2012
Residential Schools Called a Form of Genocide
Story by the Globe and Mail
The chairman of Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission says removing more than 100,000 aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in residential schools was an act of genocide.
Justice Murray Sinclair says the United Nations defines genocide to include the removal of children based on race, then placing them with another race to indoctrinate them. He says Canada has been careful to ensure its residential school policy was not “caught up” in the UN’s definition.
“That’s why the minister of Indian affairs can say this was not an act of genocide,” Judge Sinclair told students at the University of Manitoba Friday. “But the reality is that to take children away and to place them with another group in society for the purpose of racial indoctrination was – and is – an act of genocide and it occurs all around the world.”
About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were forced to attend the government schools over much of the past century. The last school closed outside Regina in 1996.
The $60-million truth and reconciliation commission is part of a landmark compensation deal between the federal government, the Crown and residential school survivors. It is about halfway through its mandate and has visited about 500 communities, where it has heard graphic details of rampant sexual and physical abuse.
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