CANADA
The Guardian
The Canadian government has offered a cash settlement for indigenous people forced into residential schools as children, Anne McIlroy reports
Tuesday January 3, 2006
They were plucked from their families as young children and sent to live in church-run schools where they were forbidden to speak their own languages. The idea was to prepare indigenous children for life in white society.
Many were beaten, sexually abused and subjected to daily cruelties throughout their traumatic childhoods. It was, in the words of Phil Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, "the single most disgraceful, harmful and racist act" in Canada's history.