Boarding home survivors awaiting compensation now press for federal apology

Reginald Percival still vividly remembers the sound of his mother and other distraught parents screaming on that day in 1969 when he and hundreds of other First Nations children were rounded up by the RCMP.

Percival, who was 13 at the time, said he was called by his Indian status number and bundled onto a bus in northern B.C., not knowing where he was going.

"I opened the bus window and looked out and my mom was out there and it's like a funeral," Percival said. "There was so much crying — … loud crying."

Percival was warned about this day. His dad, who died a week before Percival was taken from their Nisga'a Nation family home, shared a story with his son about residential schools. 

"He said, 'You're going to be taken soon,' and he said, 'We can't stop it because if we stop it, the RCMP come and they take us out,'" Percival said. "You don't want to see your parents go to jail either."

But Percival wasn't sent to residential school that day.

Instead, he spent the next several years with families he did not know, far away from his own, under a policy known as the federal Boarding Home Program.

For more than four decades, the federal government paid mostly non-Indigenous families to house approximately 40,000 First Nations and Inuit children while they attended elementary and high schools between the 1950s and early 1990s. 

The families were supposed to care for the children. Many instead endured repeated physical, sexual, verbal and psychological abuse.

Now, the suffering of boarding home survivors is being recognized and compensated under a Federal Court-approved $1.9-billion settlement agreement with Ottawa. 

The deal is designed to make it easier for survivors to make claims than previous settlements for Indigenous people did. But it does not include a recommendation for an official apology — and Percival said the federal government should step up.

"The prime minister of Canada has an obligation, I think, to say … I'm sorry for what happened. Because some of us never made it home," Percival said.

Boarding home survivors were left out of a 2008 official apology by then-prime minister Stephen Harper for residential schools, and subsequent apologies by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree said the federal government will look at other ways it can support survivors.