Thread by @Reuters

Tens of thousands of indigenous children taken to Canadian residential schools run mostly by the Catholic Church were tortured and robbed of their childhoods. @amp6 spoke to survivor Ruth Roulette on @TwitterSpaces 👇

🔉 The history of the schools 1/6

Ruth explains what she wants the world to know about Canada’s indigenous school system:
‘These institutions were made to take away our culture and belief systems. Not to educate us’ 2/6

Ruth arrived at the school when she was 6 years old. Her head was shaved. She was bathed in DDT.

“I remember seeing my hair on the floor and wondering, ‘why are they doing this to us?’” 3/6

Even through all the physical abuse and torture, the feeling of loneliness is what sticks with Ruth to this day.

‘They say the worst pain in the world is homesickness and I believe that.’

Ruth explains how she’s healed 4/6

‘I never told my children anything that happened to me in residential school,’ where it was a sin to hug one another.

‘And yet they were committing all these sins against us. The sexual abuse, the physical abuse, the mental abuse – every kind of abuse you can think of’ 5/6

‘It was to get rid of the Indian in us. But they didn’t, we’re still here.’ There were many others who faced these hardships and lost out on a childhood.

Read more about Ruth’s experience and Canada’s indigenous residential schools reut.rs/3g8ubmQ @amp6 6/6