On April 1, in the year 2022, just over 500 years since first contact, Canada’s First Nation leaders finally received an apology from the Pope and an Institution that sought to eradicate them from the very beginning through assimilative policies like Residential Schools and cultural repression.
Indigenous leaders spent the last part of March and the first few days of April looking for their long-awaited apology for the Roman Catholic Church’s involvement in the running of 60% of Canada’s Residential Schools. The three Indigenous organizations, the Assembly of First Nations, Métis National Council, and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami also wanted the Pope to denounce centuries-old policies like the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius, which is Latin for nobody’s land or “land of no one”. The policies were implemented by one of Pope Francis’s predecessors just over 500 years ago. The two policies were designed to appropriate Indigenous lands in North and South America and were termed “colonial and racist” by the Assembly of First Nations. Actually, The Doctrine of Discovery allowed European monarchs and explorers to claim any lands they stumbled onto if the lands were vacant of any Christian people. This was the primary precept embedded into terra nullius, which according to the Indigenous leaders was its racists component.
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A note from the CFR Website Facilitator:
This is the Residential School I went to from 1962 to 1969. The school was located on the northern outskirts of Brandon, Manitoba. When I left, Canada started closing Residential Schools, finally admitting that their instruments of assimilation were not working as well as they had hoped for. However, Canada re-opened this school for two more years in a smaller, less oppressive dorm-like environment.
As a kid, I used to go back to the school on my bike to play baseball with the kids as many of them were the same kids I knew from when I was there.