Pope Francis’ Canada visit stirs complex feelings among residential school survivors
Global News
The Pope's upcoming visit to Canada is evoking complex feelings among many Indigenous people. For some, the ongoing pain makes it hard to let go of the anger.
Residential school survivor Rod Alexis remembers his late father telling him: “Son, I don’t know how to be a parent.”
“I lost the gift that was given to us by the Creator because I was all alone in the residential school,” the member of the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation recalls his father, also a residential school survivor, saying. “Many times I wanted to say ‘I love you,’ wanted to give you a hug, but I didn’t know how.”
The Pope’s upcoming visit to Canada is evoking complex feelings among many Indigenous people. Some residential school survivors and those living with the intergenerational trauma the institutions caused are ready to forgive the Roman Catholic Church for the brutality it inflicted on Indigenous peoples.
For others, the ongoing pain makes it hard to let go of the anger.
“They killed our spirit,” says Alexis. “Some of those wounds are too far gone. We see our young generation today dying of drugs, alcohol, a lot of them in jails because of the effects of the trauma that they went through.”
Canada forced an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Metis and Inuit children to attend residential schools over a century, and the Catholic Church ran about 60 per cent of the institutions. The last residential school closed in 1996.
The children were punished for speaking their languages and practising their culture. They were separated from their families and, in many cases, were subjected to psychological, physical and sexual abuse.
Pope Francis is to land in Edmonton on Sunday before going to Quebec City on Wednesday and Iqaluit on Friday. It’s expected the pontiff will deliver an apology for the Catholic Church’s role in residential schools near the site of the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School in the community of Maskwacis, Alta.
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