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When the Pope Came to Canada – The Walrus

by ahnationtalk on July 12, 2023148 Views

Jul. 12, 2023

The country south of Edmonton looked like an infinite chessboard: giant flat squares of farmer’s green and canola yellow broken up here and there by stands of tall trees. Above, the great sky was an old, lasting bruise: darker and lighter shades of purple and grey spread everywhere, sharp sunlight curving down like a sickle. I was looking out the window of an air-conditioned media bus, going to an unprecedented event in Indigenous, Canadian, and Catholic history.

A few thousand people were making their way to the First Nations community of Maskwacis that July morning. The majority of them were survivors—and their descendants—of Canada’s federally mandated residential school system, which was largely administered, in arrangement with government authorities, by members of the Catholic Church. Over 130 schools had housed some 150,000 Indigenous children from 1831 to 1997, tearing those children from their parents and rupturing families across multiple generations through sibling separation, linguistic and cultural suppression, and sexual and physical abuse. According to the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), children were too ashamed to speak of what had happened to them or were dismissed by school authorities. Among the families that had adopted Christianity, many parents “could not believe that the people of God looking after their children would ever do such things.”

Read More: https://thewalrus.ca/religion/

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