CANADA
CBC News
By John Paul Tasker, CBC News Posted: Mar 20, 2017
Leaders of the Anglican Church of Canada have penned a strongly worded letter to Lynn Beyak, the Conservative senator who recently mounted a defence of the Indian residential school system, to denounce her remarks and take ownership of the atrocities committed in the church-run schools.
In a letter sent Monday, church leaders said they were “dismayed” that Beyak would try and shed a positive light on the system, telling her, rather, “the overall view is grim. It is shadowed and dark; it is sad and shameful.”
“Senator Beyak, you are quite right in saying that for a small minority of survivors, their personal experiences of residential school were ‘good.’ But in much greater numbers, the personal experiences of children who were housed in those schools were ‘bad — very bad in fact,” the letter, written by the Most Rev. Fred Hiltz, the archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, the Right Rev. Mark MacDonald, the national Indigenous Anglican bishop, and the church’s general secretary, Michael Thompson, said.
The church leaders note children were forcibly removed from their homes, subjected to exacting punishment for speaking their native tongues and were subjected to “rampant” physical, sexual and mental abuse.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.