Canadian governments and churches pursued a policy of “cultural genocide” against the country’s aboriginal people throughout the 20th century, according to an investigation into a long-suppressed history that saw 150,000 Native, or First Nations, children forcibly removed from their families and incarcerated in residential schools rife with abuse.

After seven years of hearings, and testimony from thousands of witnesses, the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on Tuesday for a new era of forgiveness and understanding even as it exposed the cultural and personal devastation inflicted by the residential schools policy in excruciating detail.

“These measures were part of a coherent policy to eliminate Aboriginal people as distinct peoples and to assimilate them into the Canadian mainstream against their will,” the commission’s final report declares.

“The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources.”

Financed by the award from a huge class action suit against the federal government, the project proceeded despite the reluctance – and occasional interference – of the Conservative government of the prime minister, Stephen Harper. It was a “difficult, inspiring and painful journey”, according to the commission chair, Murray Sinclair, a Manitoba judge whose parents and grandparents both survived residential schools.

“The residential school experience is clearly one of the darkest, most troubling chapters in our collective history,” Sinclair told a news conference in Ottawa.

From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 aboriginal children were forced to attend Christian schools to rid them of their native cultures and integrate them into Canadian society.

Children inducted into residential schools were forbidden from speaking their native languages and subjected to routine physical abuse, inadequate nutrition and neglect. Sexual abuse was common, according to the survivors who testified at commission hearings throughout the country.



“They were stripped of their self-respect and they were stripped of their identity,” Sinclair said.

More than 3,000 children died and were often buried in unmarked graves without any identification or notice to their parents. Death rates among indigenous children at residential schools were higher than among Canadian soldiers in the second world war, the report found. These were schools that often had no playgrounds but always had graveyards, according to commissioner Marie Wilson.

“Parents … had their children ripped out of their arms, taken to a distant and unknown place, never to be seen again,” she said. “Buried in an unmarked grave, long ago forgotten and overgrown. Think of that. Bear that. Imagine that.”

The report makes 94 recommendations to repair the resulting damage to First Nations society, which is easily apparent throughout Canada. Native children are eight times more likely than other Canadian children to be wards of child protection services, according to Wilson. They are massively overrepresented in the country’s jails.

“We need reconciliation so that broken families can become whole again,” she said, “and we need reconciliation so that a broken country can become whole again.”

Many of the recommendations in the report aim to repair cultural attitudes that remain unchanged from 100 years ago, including changes to educational curricula to promote “a broader, less-Eurocentric vision of our country”, according to Wilson. The report also calls for a national research program to advance the understanding of reconciliation itself.

“The words of the apologies will ring hollow if Canada’s actions fail to produce the necessary social, cultural, political and economic change that benefits aboriginal peoples and all Canadians,” the report said.

Aboriginal affairs minister Bernard Valcourt responded to the report by promising the government’s continuing “commitment to joining Canada’s aboriginal peoples on a journey to healing and reconciliation”.

Although Harper has balked at using the word “genocide” to describe the experience, his 2008 apology to victims of the residential schools policy set the stage for the settlement that financed the commission.

“The burden of this experience has been on your shoulders for far too long,” Valcourt told Monday’s conference, to warm applause from a large, mainly Native audience. “The burden is properly ours, as a government and as a country.”

The commissioners recommended that Native spiritual beliefs be included in the religious curriculum in government-supported Catholic schools, and they called on Pope Francis to issue an apology within one year for the church’s role in the “spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse” of First Nations children.

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Taking aim at the federal government, the report also calls for a public inquiry into the recent fate of hundreds of missing or murdered aboriginal women and girls – something it has strongly resisted in the past. The commission has had a troubled relationship with the federal government since its inception, causing its original commissioners to resign and leading to accusations of obstruction throughout its seven-year research.

“Our leaders must not fear this onus of reconciliation,” Sinclair said. “The burden is not theirs to bear alone; rather, reconciliation is a process that involves all parties of this new relationship.”