Native Canadians Seek Compensation For Abuse In Schools

by Mark Bourrie

"Three minutes after I got there, came my first slap. I was knocked to the floor and against the wall," he recalls.

Metatabowin was only five-year-old on that September afternoon in 1944. Like thousands of other indigenous people in Canada, he says the government's assimilation program left him physically and spiritually broken. "I always look at 5-year-old kids these days and wonder, 'Boy, was I that small?'"

Metatabowin is one of thousands of Native Canadians seeking financial compensation from the federal government for abuse suffered in the residential (boarding) school system that operated in Canada for more than 300 years. Changes in government policy and recent court decisions have made compensation to residential school victims inevitable, experts on the issue say.

At least 1,000 Native Canadians have already filed lawsuits against the government and the churches that operated the schools. Large class action suits alleging "cultural abuse" are being organized now, says John Milloy, a historian at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, and an expert on the residential school system.

"The issue will just continue to grow," he says. "It's not going to go away. And there's no doubt that Native abuse victims will be compensated."

Vancouver lawyer Peter Grant, who acted for most of the 30 indigenous people who filed the lawsuit, says the court's decision is a major victory for victims of the school system.

"My clients have suffered a great deal and should be entitled to move ahead with their healing," he says. "Despite the fact that the Church and the federal government have done nothing but deny, deny, deny, the court adopted our argument that the school was a joint venture. It appears that they are 50-50 responsible for the suffering and sexual abuse of my clients."

Most of the Native Canadians involved in the British Columbia lawsuit were abused sexually and physically by Arthur Henry Plint, a dormitory supervisor who worked at the Port Alberni Residential School on Vancouver Island between 1948 and 1968. Plint was sentenced to 11 years in prison in 1977 by a judge who called him a "sexual terrorist."

Through the early years of Canada's colonization, only a small minority of indigenous children were educated by Christian missionaries. However, as settlement expanded to the west and the north, policymakers began seeing the schools as a tool for assimilation.

By the 1880s, forcibly taking children from reserves and placing them in residential schools, often hundreds of kilometers from their families, became government policy. The schools wound down in the 1960s, and the last one closed in 1985.

Between 1900 and 1960, Australia had a similar program of removing aboriginal children from their families and placing them in missionary-run schools or with non-aboriginal families.

Two factors have opened up the possibility of compensation for victims of Canada's residential school system: the government's official apology to school survivors last January, and a new report by federal lawyers that says the government has a legal responsibility for abuse in the schools.

More than 80 residential schools operated at the peak of the program, in the mid-20th century. Government officials estimate that about 125,000 indigenous Canadian children passed through the system. The schools had a remarkable record of failing to educate children for life in either the indigenous culture or the non-indigenous world.

Phil Fontaine, the Cree Indian lawyer who heads the Assembly of First Nations, the national body that represents Native Canadians, says the residential school he was sent to never had a high school graduate in more than 50 years of operation. He achieved his education after years of struggling with the effects of being taken away from his parents when he was a small child.

Native Canadians say the schools attracted sadists and sexual predators. Grant, the lawyer for the Port Alberni school victims, says there are literally thousands of residential school victims across Canada. "How could these schools have been such a haven for pedophiles if they hadn't been set up by (the Canadian government) expressly to destroy aboriginal culture by getting at the children?" he argues.

Canada's Christian Churches face a financial disaster if the government does not rescue them from the wave of court rulings expected within the next few years.

"This is a major threat to every church in the country," says Gerry Kelly, spokesman of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. "The potential costs are exceedingly high. The number of cases has just grown and grown."