Trudeau: Residential schools part of Canada's colonial past

Canadian Minister Justin Trudeau says residential schools were part of a larger colonial policy designed to erase language and culture, and to assimilate Indigenous communities so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples

TORONTO -- Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday that residential schools for Canada's Indigenous children were part of a larger colonial policy designed to erase language and culture and to assimilate those groups so they no longer existed as distinct peoples. Trudeau said the discovery of 215 children found buried at a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, is part of a larger tragedy. The institutions held children taken from families across the nation. Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia said the remains of 215 children were confirmed last month with the help of ground-penetrating radar. “Children should never have been sent to those so-called schools — places where they were separated from their families and their communities, places where they faced terrible loneliness, places where they suffered unthinkable abuse,” Trudeau said in an emergency debate in Parliament.