CANADA
Vancouver Westender
By Sean Condon
Dec 01 2005
Payoff to residential school victims lets churches off easy, elder says
Wilfred Price, a 57-year-old Haida elder, knows the sort of damage residential schools can do to a family. Both his father and uncle were snatched away from their village when they were children and taken away to a residential school in Alert Bay, on Vancouver Island. They spent eight years in the school and were completely cut off their family.
"When my father went to school, his father did not know that he had been in school for five years," says Price, who's helping organize a series of protests and sit-ins at churches across Vancouver, starting Dec. 4.
"The principal asked [my father], 'How come [you don't] get gifts?' My father says, 'My dad doesn't know we're alive, and letters that are sent home only reach an Indian agent who throws them away.'"
Run by the Anglican, Catholic and United churches, residential schools operated across Canada for more than a century. The system, sponsored by the federal government, forcibly removed aboriginal children from their communities in order to assimilate them into white culture. The school environment was rife with physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
Price says his father and uncle would later tell him horror stories of seeing large numbers of aboriginal children being buried in unmarked graves. Although the federal government announced last week it would pay $1.9 billion for residential school survivors, Price says the deal lets the churches off the hook. He says he won't be satisfied until the churches admit they killed thousands of aboriginal children and help begin to uncover their remains.