Phil Fontaine's lifelong mission to get a papal apology delayed, but not over

While a long-awaited trip to visit Pope Francis at the Vatican was delayed due to concerns about the omicron variant, Phil Fontaine says he's more determined than ever to make sure the apology he's been fighting to hear for at least 31 years now will be made.

Fontaine is widely known as one one of the most prominent First Nations leaders in Canada as the former Assembly of First Nations national chief. 

While he has many other titles, it seems the one that drives him the most is that of residential school survivor.

This week, he and a delegation of other residential school survivors were supposed to leave for Rome to meet the Pope to ask, among other things, for an apology from the Catholic Church for its role in the harms caused during the residential school era to former students.

"I have a long history of the residential school experiences in my family. There were ten of us. Eight boys, two girls that attended residential schools, some of my brothers [attended] two schools as I did," Fontaine said from his home in Calgary.

"Our mother and father were both students at the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School. My grandmother on my father's side was a student at the St. Boniface Industrial School, where a lot of students perished."

He says he and his family, like thousands of other Indigenous people in Canada, have suffered greatly at the hands of the Catholic Church — something he first opened up about 31 years ago on CBC.

Fontaine says he's listened to an interview he did with CBC's Barbara Frum in 1990 many times, and says his desire to expose what he was saw, heard and felt while as a residential school student motivated him to do the interview.

"It was what I had experienced around me. What I had heard, what I had seen, and how the church to some extent had corrupted us as individuals and communities," he added.

Speaking out made Fontaine the first person to talk publicly about what happened in residential schools, and he says he felt backlash for it at the time.

"I understood then that this struck a nerve in our people, even though I was chastised for speaking about this in a public forum, especially at chiefs' meeting," Fontaine said. He said his fellow chiefs chastised him, asking him not to talk about the abuse he and others experienced.

WATCH | From the archives, Phil Fontaine's testimony of physical and sexual abuse:

But he didn't stop speaking. And soon after, his actions became louder than his words as he and others worked toward securing the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement.

The agreement brought on the apology delivered by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008.