Pope Francis gives a press conference aboard the papal plane during his return flight after visiting Canada on July 29. GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE/Reuters
When Pope Francis said on his way out of Canada that he believed what happened in that country’s schools amounted to genocide, what many indigenous people across the country heard was a long-delayed admission of an obvious truth.
Ghislaine Picard, Assembly of First Nations regional chief for Quebec and Labrador, said the pope’s comments, which he made on his flight back to Rome at the end of his six-day tour of Canada, were a sign of progress.
“Throughout the week there was a lot of criticism because the pope seemed hesitant to name things,” said Mr. Picard, who is Innu.
“A lot of people might say ‘too little, too late,’ but I think there’s an opportunity to build on that.”
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During the Pope’s travels in Canada, which lasted from July 24 to 29, he visited Alberta, Quebec and Nunavut. Along the way, he made several apologies for the role of Catholics in the injuries at Canadian dormitories, about 60 percent of which were run by the church.
Some survivors welcomed these apologies, while critics, including former senator and Truth and Reconciliation Commission chairman Murray Sinclair, said the pope’s apologies failed to recognize the church’s institutional role.
Prior to Friday, Francis had not used the term “genocide” at any point during his visit to Canada. At the start of the trip, he spoke of “destroying the culture,” disappointing many residential school survivors and their descendants who believed the phrase was an understatement.
“It’s true that I didn’t use the word because I didn’t think of it,” Francis said Friday in response to a reporter’s question during his flight. “Yes, genocide is a technical word, but I didn’t use it because I didn’t think of it. But… yes, it was genocide, yes, yes, sure. You could say I said it was genocide.
In its final report in 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission stated that the establishment and operation of residential schools amounted to “cultural genocide”, which the report defined as the destruction of structures and practices that allow a group of people to continue working as group.
Indigenous children who attended the schools, which had been in operation for more than a century, were separated from their parents and communities and forbidden to speak their native languages. Sometimes they were physically or sexually abused. The National Center for Truth and Reconciliation maintains a registry of more than 4,000 children who died during or after attending the institutions.
Evelyn Korkmaz, who is a member of the Fort Albany First Nation and a residential school survivor, said she found it hard to believe the pope hadn’t thought of the term earlier in his visit, given that he heard the stories of residential school survivors while in Canada.
“Anyone who listens to these stories, that they were taken from their families and that they lost their language, their culture, their traditions – everyone knows that this is called cultural genocide,” Ms. Korkmaz said.
“I find it hard to believe that it didn’t even occur to him to integrate this into his speech while he was here in Canada. It would have been nice to hear those words while he was here on our land.
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Mr Pickard noted that there had been a public debate about whether it was appropriate to use the word “genocide” to describe what happened in the residential schools.
Now that the Pope has used the term, he hopes that debate will end.
“For me, it’s not about numbers. That’s really the impact it has on people. And the intention [of residential schools] was very clear: not only to assimilate, but to eradicate the indigenous peoples of this country,” he said.
Mr Picard added that he hoped the pope’s comments would be followed by action, including steps to repeal the Doctrine of Discovery, a concept based on 15th-century papal decrees. The doctrine helped form the legal rationale for the colonization of non-Christian lands by European states.
Bev Sellars, member of the Xatśūll First Nation and author of They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival in an Indian Boarding Schoolsaid he welcomed the pope’s comments on genocide.
“We need to have these tough conversations – not only that this is genocide, but that the land has been stolen and a destructive way of life has been brought here,” Ms Sellars said.
She did not participate in the papal visit and avoided media coverage of the event, she said, having worked on her experience at the former St. Joseph Missionary School, near Williams Lake, British Columbia, on her own terms.
An apology was long overdue, Ms Sellers said, adding that in the early 1990s she was involved in research into the effects of residential schools, including intergenerational trauma and family breakdown.
“It doesn’t matter to me, but to some people it will. And they need to take that power back,” Ms Sellars said.
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