Canada Apology for Native Schools

June 11, 2008

Author: Staff Writer

Source: BBC News

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7447811.stm

Canada has apologised for forcing about 150,000 aboriginal children to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools aimed at assimilating them.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made the apology in parliament in Ottawa, in front of hundreds of ex-schoolchildren. The schools operated from the late 19th Century until the 1990s, although most of them shut in the 1970s.

Accounts of physical and sexual abuse at the institutions, known as residential schools, have also emerged.