CANADA
The Star

January 17, 2019

By Tanya Talaga

Evelyn Korkmaz is not waiting to see if she’ll receive an official invitation from the Vatican to attend the historic Papal Summit on sexual abuse.

While Pope Francis and the world’s Catholic bishops meet inside Vatican City walls from Feb. 21 to 24, Korkmaz, a survivor of the notorious St. Anne’s Indian Residential School, will join other global survivors in Rome as they hold an alternate “Ending Clergy Abuse” event.

Now 61, Korkmaz spent the most horrific years of her life as a student at St. Anne’s, which was run by Oblate Catholic nuns. Children who attended the school, which opened in 1906, were routinely abused, beaten and malnourished. Students lived in fear of the homemade electric chair used to punish them.

Korkmaz was sexually assaulted at the school, which was one of 139 Indian Residential Schools in Canada that existed from the mid-1800s to 1996. Nearly 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken away from their families, homes and communities and placed in government-funded, church-run schools meant to erase their identities and to assimilate them into colonized, Christian Canada.

Pope Francis has refused to apologize for Canada’s residential school experience, even though many of the schools were Catholic. Last year, he acknowledged the abuse suffered at the hands of the clergy in Chile but still Indigenous people in Canada wait. “What have the Aboriginal people done that we don’t have the same respect as those in the other countries?” Korkmaz asks.

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.

CANADA
The Star

January 17, 2019

By Tanya Talaga

Evelyn Korkmaz is not waiting to see if she’ll receive an official invitation from the Vatican to attend the historic Papal Summit on sexual abuse.

While Pope Francis and the world’s Catholic bishops meet inside Vatican City walls from Feb. 21 to 24, Korkmaz, a survivor of the notorious St. Anne’s Indian Residential School, will join other global survivors in Rome as they hold an alternate “Ending Clergy Abuse” event.

Now 61, Korkmaz spent the most horrific years of her life as a student at St. Anne’s, which was run by Oblate Catholic nuns. Children who attended the school, which opened in 1906, were routinely abused, beaten and malnourished. Students lived in fear of the homemade electric chair used to punish them.

Korkmaz was sexually assaulted at the school, which was one of 139 Indian Residential Schools in Canada that existed from the mid-1800s to 1996. Nearly 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken away from their families, homes and communities and placed in government-funded, church-run schools meant to erase their identities and to assimilate them into colonized, Christian Canada.

Pope Francis has refused to apologize for Canada’s residential school experience, even though many of the schools were Catholic. Last year, he acknowledged the abuse suffered at the hands of the clergy in Chile but still Indigenous people in Canada wait. “What have the Aboriginal people done that we don’t have the same respect as those in the other countries?” Korkmaz asks.

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.