Thousands march in Vancouver for “residential school” reconciliation

For about 100 years, the federal government funded Christian-church run schools across Canada for aboriginal children, with the last one closing in 1996. Ostensibly to provide aboriginal children with an education and bring them into the “modern” world, the system however was terribly flawed.

Aboriginal children were obliged to be sent to these usually quite distant boarding schools where they would remain separated from their families and communities often for years at a time, Their culture was denied, their aboriginal language prohibited, usually harshly, and there is now a vast multitude of tales of physical and sexual abuse of the children at the hands of priests and other officials in the residential school concept.

In the major west coast city of Vancouver, about ten thousand people, most of who had no connection to the residential school system, showed up in pouring rain to march in solidarity with the school survivors along a 4 km route through the city.

They also heard the daughter of Martin Luther King jr, Bernice King, speak to them.

“My father said something very powerful about progress. He said, human progress is neither automatic, nor inevitable,” she said from a stage set up at the start of the march,

“Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step towards the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle

The march came at the end of a week long session of hearings by the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The fact finding hearings were set up as part of a settlement between the government, the victims, and the various church organizations that ran the schools.

The Vancouver hearings were the sixth of seven scheduled across Canada. The final hearing will take place in Edmonton next year, after which the commissions will issue its report.

(with files from CBC)