May 1, 2000 Sins of the Father - Residential Schools special report

The legacy of Indian residential schools is one of physical and emotional scars, nasty lawsuits, a questionable medical study, and suicide. What happens next will shape much of Canada's secular and religious landscape, and determine the fate of many "survivors" of a fatally flawed system.

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May 1, 2000 Sins of the Fathers

Ben Pratt is squeezing a dirty old baseball cap between his beefy fingers. We are seated in a small room in the sparkling new administrative building on the Gordon Indian Reserve in Punnichy, Sask., about 150 kilometres north of...

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May 1, 2000 Who is to blame?

The plight of residential-school "survivors" such as Pratt raises the question of whether God's words in the second of the Ten Commandments - "I will visit the sins of the fathers on the children for three or four...

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May 1, 2000 Not all students, not all teachers

But if all perspectives of Indian residential schools are to be taken into account, it must be understood that these schools were not all bad places run by bad people. "I don't like to be thought of as a villain. I don't...

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May 1, 2000 The "Indian" problem

One of the first significant dates in the history of residential schools is 1842, the year the Bagot Commission Report advised the government of Upper Canada that Aboriginals ought to acquire "industry and knowledge,"...

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May 1, 2000 Incubators for disease

At residential school, everything was different for Native children: hair was cut short, uniforms were mandatory, and punishment could be cruel and unusual. "In the vision of residential-school education, discipline was...

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May 1, 2000 Some left the church in anger

At their peak in the 1930s, there were 80 residential schools in all provinces and territories except New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. By 1945, there were 9,149 children in residential school, but only...

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May 1, 2000 "Dark, black cloud"

Aware of the "dark, black cloud" that hung over Native communities in Canada, Phil Fontaine, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, came forward at an AFN gathering in the Yukon in 1992 (at which time he was Grand Chief of...

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May 1, 2000 Eight victims killed themselves

I visited Sampson on the Siska Indian Band Reserve five kilometres south of Lytton. It's here on a reserve that has an estimated 90 per cent unemployment rate that the 42-year-old artist coaxes beautiful images from soapstone and...

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May 1, 2000 Too much for some to bear

Ben Pratt pursued justice through the legal system, less out of malevolence than because he saw no other logical route. Eventually, he won a settlement as part of a civil suit, which came in the wake of a criminal conviction...

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