Pope's residential school apology prompts mixed emotions from Manitoba survivors

WARNING: This story contains distressing details.

For Phil Fontaine, watching the heartfelt apology delivered by Pope Francis at the site of one of Canada's largest residential schools on Monday illuminated a path forward for survivors and others affected by the legacy of the institutions. 

"I'm as optimistic as I was earlier in the day…The Pope expressed not just an apology. He didn't just say, 'I am sorry.' I think he laid out the work ahead of us," said Fontaine, the former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, who is from Sagkeeng First Nation in Manitoba, on CBC's The National Monday night.

The apology came on the first day of what the Pope called his "penitential pilgrimage," when he apologized for members of the Catholic Church who co-operated with Canada's "devastating" policy of Indigenous residential schools.

He said the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed their families and marginalized generations in ways still being felt today.

"I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples," Francis told thousands of Indigenous people, including many survivors, who converged on Maskwacis, Alta., about 100 kilometres south of Edmonton.

While the Pope apologized for the actions of individual Catholics and asked for forgiveness, he did not explicitly apologize for the role of the church as an institution. 

WATCH | Phil Fontaine on what Pope's apology means to him:

But Fontaine, a survivor of the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba who led the negotiations that resulted in the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, said accepting the apology on behalf of the man who speaks on behalf of the Catholic church is an important step in moving forward.

"If we're true to our word in terms of healing and reconciliation, we're going to have to be able to forgive. He's come here before us a humble person begging for forgiveness, and of course you have to take that seriously. 

"Because we also want to move on. We want to find peace and solace in our lives. And if we can't bring ourselves to forgive, then this matter, this burden that we've had to shoulder for years and years, that'll carry on endlessly."

Not all survivors were as satisfied with the Pope's apology. Vivian Ketchum, a survivor of the Cecilia Jeffery Indian Residential School in Kenora who now lives in Winnipeg, said it seemed to her like the pontiff's words "glossed over" the full truth of the effect the institutions have to this day.

"I think the sincerity might have been there, but I don't think he fully comprehends the whole situation and what was done to us: second generation, third generation. The loss of language, culture," said Ketchum, who was physically and sexually abused as a child at residential school in the 1970s.

She said she also noticed the Pope didn't mention any of the sexual abuse children suffered at the institutions, or the impact that day schools had on children forced to attend them.