In Canada, indigenous children are apparently still separated from their parents – decades after the end of the brutal boarding school system.
That’s what he says United Nations Human Rights Monitor for Indigenous Peoples after a visit to Canada. As an indication, he mentions that more than half of the children in care are indigenous children. At the same time, their share of the total number of children in Canada is only 7 percent.
The UN representative criticizes that the minors often end up in non-indigenous foster families and thus lose their language, culture and contact with relatives. The child welfare system would thus continue the negative consequences of the earlier boarding school system.
In Canada, between the 19th century and the 1990s, around 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families. They were placed in church boarding schools, where they were subjected to violence, sexual abuse, starvation and disease. Corresponding graves had been found on school grounds in recent years, which caused international horror.
