‘I feel shame and pain’: Pope apologizes to Indigenous people of Canada

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VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis apologized Friday for the Catholic Church’s involvement in a system of Canadian boarding schools that abused Indigenous children for 100 years, an announcement that comes after the discovery last year of signs of unmarked graves with the remains of dozens of children.

“I feel shame and pain,” for the “deplorable” abuses, the pope said. “I ask forgiveness of God, and I join the Canadian bishops in apologizing.”

Francis also promised he would travel to Canada, where he would be better able to show “my closeness” as part of a process of healing and reconciliation.

Francis spoke during an audience at the Apostolic Palace with 62 delegates from Canada’s three largest Indigenous groups, who had traveled to the Vatican seeking his apology. This was the first apology to the Indigenous people of Canada from a pope and was a reversal of Francis’ earlier position.

From the 1880s to the 1990s, the Canadian government ran a system of compulsory boarding schools that a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission called a form of “cultural genocide.” The Catholic Church operated about 70% of the schools in the system.

About 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and sent to these residential schools, where abuse, both physical and sexual, was widespread, along with neglect and disease. Murray Sinclair, the former judge who headed the commission, estimates that at least 6,000 children went missing.

Friday’s audience, which began with prayers in the languages of various Indigenous groups, including the “Our Father” sung by members of the Inuit delegation, ended an emotional — and at times painful — weeklong encounter at the Vatican, part of a journey that began decades ago.

“For 40 years plus I’ve been on this walk to Rome,” said Wilton Littlechild, the former grand chief of the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations in Alberta and Saskatchewan, said at a media briefing Thursday.

In private sessions earlier this week with Métis, Inuit and First Nations delegates, Francis heard story after painful story of the abuse suffered at the hands of Catholic educators at the schools. Delegates — including survivors, leaders, elders, youth and spiritual advisers from various nations — said the pope had listened attentively and had expressed his sorrow. The delegates said this week that they believed the pope’s commitment to healing open wounds was sincere.

Fred Kelly, an elder from the Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation in Ontario, said he had been honored to speak with Francis, who was not only “the head of the church” but above all “a human being with a heart and with compassion.” He said he had brought Francis a pair of moccasins and that he had invited the pope to “walk with us.”

Kelly, who was one of the spiritual advisers in the group, also gave Francis a spiritual name: “I told him in my language you are now known as white feather,” he said, as he presented him with a white feather. “To commemorate the eagle that has joined and now flies with the white dove. The words peace and harmony lead into the words ultimate reconciliation and healing that we may be true brothers and sisters once again, as was intended by the creator of the Great Spirit, God, as each one of us understands.”

In addition to asking Francis to come to Canada to apologize to survivors and their families, the delegates asked Francis to repatriate artifacts in the collections of Vatican Museums and open the Vatican archives so researchers could comb through records and documents regarding the residential school system.

The delegates also asked Francis to revoke a 1493 papal bull issued by Pope Alexander VI that had given Spain authority over the newly discovered lands of the Americas, allowing the Spanish to colonize and enslave the Indigenous peoples and convert them to Catholicism. The papal bull, which informed the “doctrine of discovery,” was “used for centuries to expropriate Indigenous lands and facilitate their transfer to colonizing or dominating nations,” according to the United Nations.

Indigenous groups in Canada say that while the theories of racial superiority that underlie the doctrine have long been discredited, it continued to surface in legal disputes over land until 2014. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that year, without naming the papal bull, that the idea that no one owned land until it was claimed by Europeans “never applied in Canada.”

When Taylor Behn-Tsakoza, a co-chair of the National Youth Council of the Assembly of First Nations, met with Francis on Thursday, she spoke “a lot about the doctrine of discovery,” she said. She asked him to rescind the papal bull, she said, and replace it with a new formal document that valued Indigenous people and their culture.

“We didn’t just come here to complain,” she said. “We offered him solutions as well.”

“My generation didn’t go to the residential schools but we still suffered the effects,” Behn-Tsakoza said. It had been difficult growing up and watching older generations “struggle every day to be proud of who they are,” she said.

After his meeting with Francis on Thursday, Phil Fontaine, another delegate and former residential-school student who, as national chief of the Assembly of the First Nations, first traveled to the Vatican in 2009 to ask for an apology from Pope Benedict XVI, expressed hope. He said he felt “on the verge of finally turning the corner on this issue that has befuddled so many in the past.” He added, “We heard the Holy Father say to us, ‘The church is with you,’ and that was an incredibly important statement.”

The church softened its stance on apologizing last year, after three Indigenous groups announced that ground-penetrating radar had discovered signs of many hundreds of unmarked graves containing human remains, mostly those of children.

The first announcement came in May when a First Nation in British Columbia reported that a geophysical survey indicated that the remains of 215 people lay across a river from the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The anthropologist who conducted the survey said that the size of many of the remains suggested that they were children, likely among the missing.

“The eyes of the world have been upon us all week, in part because of what transpired in Kamloops,” Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations said. “News of the discovery went worldwide and I am convinced at that point the church had nowhere else to go in terms of moving forward with us.”

Gerald Antoine, the Dene national chief, said the Indigenous people of Canada were looking forward to “to fully host the Holy Father, and we are hoping that this will open a measure of trust, dignity and respect to all those people that have been harmed.”

Grand Chief Mandy Gull-Masty, of the Cree Nation of Eeyou Istchee, said Thursday that she had presented a pair of handmade snowshoes, “to remind the pope that we are still here and that Cree culture is still here.” She and her people were waiting for the pope to visit Canada, meet with survivors and their families and leaders, and provide an admission of responsibility.

“We cannot ignore the power of an apology,” she said, of “transforming anger and hurt into a healing process of peace and love.”

Francis ended the visit with a blessing in English. “Pray for me, I pray for you. Bye-bye,” he said.