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Canada’s Catholic Church Dodged its Obligations to Residential School Survivors
The Canadian Catholic Church has made settlements as far back as 2006. When will the church pay up and if so, how much?
In June this year, hundreds of unmarked graves full of Indigenous children’s bodies were found in western Canada near the sites of residential schools. As the presence of mass graves implies, these residential schools were not just normal boarding schools. These sites of cultural genocide were meant to kill a child’s Indigenous identity without actually killing the child.
The Canadian Catholic church ran around 60–70% of these schools, the last of which closed in 1996. Since some schools seemingly vanished from the public eye and reappeared under different denominations, an exact figure is difficult to establish. In these schools, children suffered from physical, emotional, sexual, and psychological abuse. Former Musqueam nation chief George Guerin, who went to Kuper Island school, wrote that Sister Marie Baptiste beat him with sticks “as long and thick as pool cues” for speaking his language.
Understandably so, many residential school survivors have wanted compensation from the church. In 2006, the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) between…
