Thread by @thesundaytimes

In 1902 the body of Duncan Sticks was discovered half-frozen in the snow. He had run away from a Residential School after suffering horrific abuse.

More than a century later, @SarahbaxterSTM heard similar accounts from modern-day survivors of the schools thetimes.co.uk/article/canada…

Over the summer, the discovery of more than a thousand unmarked graves at the sites of residential schools rocked Canada. This is living history, not old news – and in Canada of all places, often regarded as one of the most liberal countries on the planet thetimes.co.uk/article/mass-g…

In 2002, Edward Gerald Fitzgerald, a former dormitory supervisor at St Joseph’s (Duncan’s former school), fled to Ireland to escape justice. He was charged the following year with 21 counts of indecent assault, buggery and common assault during the 1960s and early 1970s.

Randolph John, a member of the Nadleh Whut’en First Nation, was sexually abused by Fitzgerald. “He used to prey on all the students he could get hold of. He used to watch us shower and touch boys’ private parts with a ruler.”

The schools Fitzgerald worked at were run by a Catholic order paid for by the Canadian government to turn indigenous children into docile English speakers.

Fitzgerald was part of a wave of “frontier apostles”. He was given free board and lodging and easy targets for his sadism.

The prevailing philosophy was “kill the Indian in the child”, a policy that was later described as culturally genocidal.

Children were beaten for speaking their own language. Long hair and braids were cut. They would arrive aged 4 to 6 and had no idea what was happening to them.

All the schools for “natives” were in the hands of religious groups, a legacy of 19th-century missionary zeal to educate the unconverted. After the first one opened in 1831, they became an intrinsic part of the effort to stamp out nomadic life – freeing up land for settlers.

Pupils left school at 16 with few job prospects. Generation after generation – grandparents, parents and children – were uprooted from their land and ended up living on the margins of society.

The last school closed in 1997.

To this day, the Oblates describe their purpose as the “evangelisation of the most abandoned”. They have missions in six continents and 71 countries.

Yet the children they brutalised were not abandoned. Parents were legally obliged to send their children away or face jail.

Survivors of the residential system never forgot their torment. Oral testimonies were passed down the generations. Parents feared the sexual abuse and beatings their children would face because they had suffered it themselves.

“The sexual assaults usually happened on Friday and Saturday nights. The priests would be drunk and pass out or stumble into one of the children’s beds. They would pull you aside and say, ‘If you tell anyone about it you are going to hell.’”

Read the whole story here: thetimes.co.uk/article/canada…