According to the UN, many indigenous children in Canada are still being separated from their parents decades after the end of the notorious boarding school system. The UN human rights monitor for indigenous peoples, Francisco Calí Tzay, criticized this on Friday at the end of a ten-day visit to the North American country. 53 percent of children in foster care are indigenous, although only 7.7 percent of all Canadian children are indigenous, the Guatemalan expert said.
From the 1880s to the 1990s, an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were snatched from their families in Canada and placed in church boarding schools. In the state-initiated program, they often experienced violence, sexual abuse, hunger and disease. Hundreds never came home. Findings of indigenous children’s graves on boarding school grounds have also caused international outrage in recent years.
“The child welfare system continues to remove Indigenous children from their families and perpetuates the negative impact of boarding schools,” Calí Tzay wrote in his report. Children would usually come to non-indigenous foster families and thus lose their language, culture and contacts with relatives, he criticized. The poor housing situation in the reservations is one reason for many children being taken away.
According to Calí Tzay, the trauma of boarding schools, passed down through generations, has also contributed to escalating violence against indigenous women. A truth and reconciliation commission on the school system had already established in 2015 that some victims became perpetrators themselves.