The federal government just set aside a huge sum – $40bn – to compensate the victims and relatives of a system of cruel racial exploitation that existed for much of the country’s history. This news is not about the United States, where debate over reparations for slavery have been stalled in Congress for decades. No, this news comes from the US’s neighbour to the north, Canada.The national government of Canada has agreed to set aside this sum, the equivalent of $31bn for Indigenous Canadians who were subjected to Canadian “boarding schools.” These institutions, generally operated by the Catholic Church and other religious institutions, forcibly removed First Nations, Inuit and Métis children from their parents and communities and systematically stripped them of their cultural identities while imposing upon them English and French, Christian religious practices, and white Canadian culture.This programme of state-sanctioned kidnapping and indoctrination officially ran from 1883 until the last school was closed in 1996, despite a long and well-known record of abuse. The stories that have emerged over the decades concerning these schools are horrific. Sexual abuse of children was common, and many of the schools had horrific mortality rates, as children died from tuberculosis and other communicable diseases, malnutrition, violence and even infanticide. The recent revelations of hundreds of newly-discovered unmarked graves on the sites of the now-closed boarding schools has created public outrage across Canada in recent months. These public scandals, combined with a ruling from a 2016 tribunal that surviving victims should be compensated, as well as a pair of pending lawsuits, finally prompted the Canadian government to act.
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