Pope Francis ended his six-day trip to Canada on Friday as he began with an apology for the harm done to native people. He again expressed his “outrage and shame” in front of Inuit in the Arctic.
For the last leg of his journey, the 85-year-old sovereign pontiff traveled to Iqaluit, capital of Nunavut in Canada’s far north, where he was welcomed to the sound of Inuit throat singing.
In this small town accessible only by plane and where just over 7,000 people live, mainly indigenous people, the pope spoke of the “great suffering” of those forcibly placed in boarding schools aimed at “killing the Indian in the heart of the child”.
“Families have been broken up, children taken away from their midst; winter has descended on everything,” he lamented.
Before, the pope had spoken for a long time with former residents of boarding schools for natives who had the “courage” to share their “great sufferings”.
Apologies “not complete”
Between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s, some 150,000 Inuit, Métis or members of the First Nations were forcibly enrolled in more than 130 of these institutions, cut off from their families, their language and their culture. Many of them suffered physical or sexual abuse and thousands never recovered, victims of disease, malnutrition or neglect.
For Kilikvak Kabloona, president of the Nunavut Tunngavik organization which represents the Inuit of Nunavut, “the pope’s apology was not complete”. “They did not take into account sexual abuse and did not recognize the institutional role of the Catholic Church in the protection of abusers, this protection allows sexual violence to thrive,” she said.
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