![]() She said he decided “it’s not worth the pain and suffering to relive those moments again.” He told his story initially, then authorities came back and wanted to record it. When the Canadian government offered a compensation plan to survivors, he took the minimum. “He’s been sexually abuse, he’d been physically abused and obviously mentally abused” when in residential school from Grades 1-8, she said. She said stories about her uncle were the worst she heard. But she did attend day school, which “was just as harsh,” Roy told CNS. Roy said her mother was the youngest of 12 siblings and was fortunate that she was one year too young to be taken away. ![]() “How do you forgive what’s been done to you?” he added. Native Americans “are always at the back of the line. ![]() “Why has it taken so long for the Catholic Church” or others to acknowledge what happened to Native Americans? he asked. The government owned the schools and contracted with various agencies - including some religions - to run them. And even today, in the United States, “They’re finding bodies of young children, as young as 3” at former residential schools. “She would start telling stories and then she would break down and cry,” Cornell said. He told of visiting his grandmother in Oklahoma and said the enormity of the situation did not really hit him until he was an adult. “The historical trauma is real,” Cornell said, adding, “not just from deaths, but from everything that’s been done to these people.”Ĭornell and Roy are on the coordinating team for the Catholic Native Boarding School Accountability and Healing Project, more commonly known as AHP.Ĭornell said he believes it would be really hard for many Native Americans to even accept an apology and that, as a Catholic, he struggles internally, even though he believes in the Catholic concept of forgiveness. The government paid these agencies to kill the Indian inside them.” government’s assimilation policy was nothing short of murder,” said Cornell, whose heritage is Irish and Cheyenne Arapahoe. “They ripped those children away they took them out of their hands and arms,” said Roy, an Ojibway who serves as director of the St. So when Pope Francis apologized to Canadian Indigenous for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation at residential schools, Native Americans, like many Canadian Indigenous, said forgiveness was hard - despite their Catholic faith. Terry Cornell had three family members who never came home from a residential school in the U.S. Jody Roy’s uncle was sexually and physically abused in Canada. The legacy of residential schools has been handed down to today’s Native Americans. (CNS Photo courtesy of Red Cloud Indian School) Maka Black Elk, seen in an undated photo, is executive director for truth and healing at Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.
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