Canadian Catholic bishops apologized Friday in a statement to the country’s indigenous peoples for the atrocities carried out for over a century at church-run residential schools — months after over a thousand unmarked graves were discovered at former school sites across Canada. From the 1970s until as recently as 1997, over 150,000 indigenous children were made to enroll at Canadian residential schools funded by the government and run by the Catholic, Anglican and United churches. The children were forbidden from using their native languages, forcibly converted to Christianity, and subjected to mistreatment including physical and sexual abuse; many children died from neglect, disease and suicide. Canada’s residential school system was originally inspired by a similar program for Native Americans in the United States, where many of the same horrors occurred.
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Catholic Bishops Apologize To Indigenous Canadians For Residential School Abuses | Forbes