CANADA
Leader-Post
BY KEVIN MENZ, THE STARPHOENIX, THE CANADIAN PRESS JULY 26, 2013
Erica Lee remembers Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 apology vividly.
She sat in a packed gymnasium at Saskatoon’s White Buffalo Youth Lodge, watching the television as Harper apologized from the House of Commons for abuse aboriginal people endured under the residential school system, for the Canadian government’s role in the system, and for separating children from their families. “It felt like closure. Now it’s been how many years and nothing has changed,” Lee said Thursday.
The 23-year-old University of Saskatchewan philosophy student, who is closely involved with the grassroots Idle No More movement, organized the Saskatoon leg of several Honour the Apology rallies across Canada on Thursday.
The rallies called on the federal government to release all documents on residential schools to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a national commission investigating the residential schools legacy – after nutritional experiments performed on aboriginal people in the 1940s recently came to light.
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