Canada reopens its "most disgraceful" act

By David Ljunggren

OTTAWA (Reuters) - After decades of foot-dragging, Canada is finally about to take a close look at what one aboriginal leader calls "the single most disgraceful, harmful and racist act in our history".

From the 1870s to the 1970s, around 150,000 native Indian children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to distant residential schools, where many say they were abused mentally, physically and sexually.

Conditions in the schools -- run by various churches on behalf of the government -- were sometimes dire. Contemporary accounts suggest up to half the children in some institutions died of tuberculosis.

One prominent academic calls what happened a genocide, yet for many years few Canadians knew what had happened.

Now, for the first time, the mainstream population will be learning a lot more about what was done in its name.

As part of a C$1.9 billion ($1.9 billion) settlement between Ottawa and the 90,000 school survivors in May 2006 that ended years of law suits, a truth and reconciliation commission is set to start work on June 1.

The commission, which has a life span of five years, will travel across Canada and hold public hearings on the abuses.

"You have to get the truth out ... it seems impossible today but it's real, it happened," said federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl.

Native leaders hope the commission -- to be headed by aboriginal Judge Harry LaForme -- will help improve ties between the largely marginalized one million native population and the rest of the 32 million people in Canada.

"I don't say that this is going to be a magic wand and everybody is going to feel good when this is over. But we do know there is a healing component to that sort of process,"

LaForme told Reuters.

Government officials at the time said the schools were supposed to educate native children. The other aim was to assimilate aboriginal peoples and crush their cultures.

Duncan Campbell Scott, a senior government bureaucrat dealing with aboriginal matters, declared in 1920 that "I want to get rid of the Indian problem. He added: "Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic."

Children in the schools were called pigs and dogs. Teachers beat them if they used their own languages and told them they would go to hell unless they converted to Christianity.

Many parents never saw their sons and daughters again. Survivors often took to drugs and alcohol to dim the pain.