The Canadian government has reached an agreement on billions of dollars in compensation for children of indigenous peoples who have been taken from their parents for decades by authorities to force them to adapt to the dominant white culture. In total, 40 billion Canadian dollars (28 billion euros) will be released.
Part of the amount goes to the affected children and families. Another part of the money is used to reform the system; according to the Canadian tribunal of human rights, some government organizations still discriminate against Indigenous families.
The chairman of an advocacy group for indigenous children does not want to speak of a victory yet. “I see it as words on paper. I will speak of a victory if I walk into a community and a child says to me, ‘My life is better than yesterday’.”
Abuse in schools
The Canadian government put Indigenous children in boarding schools for more than a hundred years, where they were often sexually abused and mistreated. Last year, the bodies of hundreds of children were found in mass graves near former schools.
Those boarding schools were a result of the Indian Act from 1867, a law aimed at adapting the original population to the white majority from Europe. At least 150,000 children have lived in the institutions. The last school closed in 1996.
“It is an extremely sad story,” said Serv Wiemers, an expert on Canadian minorities, previously in the NPO Radio 1 program News and Co. “There was a kind of superiority. The Europeans thought: ‘this land is ours, and it’s a shame that there is an indigenous population walking around’.”
In the schools the children were forbidden to speak their own language or to wear native clothes. They also received a Christian upbringing. “They were forced to forget their culture,” Wiemers says.
The Canadian government apologized for the school system in 2008, after which a commission of inquiry was set up. He labeled the policy as a form of “cultural genocide”.
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