Scarred for life: Canada’s uprooted Indigenous children

Scarred for life: Canada’s uprooted Indigenous children

Jimmy Papatie, just five years old, clutched at his grandmother’s skirt, his face bathed in tears. He did not want to get on the bus. He did not want to be sent away from his family, and the Canadian forest where his Algonquin tribe lived. But a police officer shoved his grandmother and grabbed the child. A few minutes later, he was herded onto the bus with other Indigenous children, and the vehicle pulled out, their screams and sobs still resonating.

It was 1969, and Papatie’s life changed forever. He was taken to a boarding school for Indigenous children at Saint-Marc-de-Figuery, not far from his family home, in an area 600 kilometers north of Montreal. Papatie would stay there until the school shut down four years later. “We didn’t know where we were going. We didn’t know what was going to happen to us. In just a few hours, we were completely uprooted-linguistically, culturally, spiritually,” Papatie, now 57, told AFP at a restaurant near the former school site.

He is just one of about 150,000 Indigenous children who were ripped from their families and placed in 139 schools meant to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian “culture”-in other words, strip them of their