LETTER: Churches need to take responsibility for role in residential schools, Maple Ridge writer says

Dear Editor,

My full sympathies are for all the recently discovered missing and murdered children of the Indian residential schools in Canada.

They were deliberately and brutally mistreated by the custodians of our past Indian residential school system. These custodians were the Roman Catholic Diocese (60 per cent) and Anglican Church (25 per cent) and financial supporter the Canadian government.

In 2008 Canadian government formally apologized to the Aboriginal people and millions of dollars were allocated to compensate some survivors.

However, the primary culprits, the churches have not been willing to descend from their elevated pulpit to admit any guilt or to apologize for their heinous crimes.

These crimes can be comparable to the holocaust by the Nazis, who were subjected to a systematic procedure of trial, sentencing, and punishment.

It is never too late to identify the responsible rich and resourceful churches, which like to hide their roles in this national tragedy. They absolutely deserve proper moral and even legal retribution, matching their deliberate “genocide” of a generation of innocent children in the guise of “helping them become intellectually, morally and religiously elevated.”

Secondly, the time has come when they ought to open their coffers to finance the projects designed to heal, sustain, and educate the children of their victimized residential school survivors.

Furthermore, it may be desirable that the selected church representatives be re-educated in one of the First Nations schools to learn respect for human life, First Nations’s history, languages and culture.

Hari Pal, Maple Ridge

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