When Phil Fontaine spoke decades ago about the sexual and physical abuse he suffered in Manitoba residential schools, he risked embarrassment and shocked Canadians.
Fontaine, an Ojibway and former Sagkeeng First Nation leader, was one of the first indigenous leaders to speak publicly about physical and psychological abuse in Canadian residential schools during a groundbreaking 1990 interview with CBC’s Barbara Frum .
Now, 32 years later, the former national leader of the Assembly of First Nations is part of a 30-member delegation that will be in the Vatican on Monday to discuss the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the horror that has taken place in Canadian homes.
Fontaine said it was “time” for a full apology from the pope.
“It is an important opportunity, in my view, for the country to achieve this right. And to do so properly means a full apology from Pope Francis,” Fontaine told CBC’s Piya Chattopadhyay on The Sunday Magazine.
Pope Francis is waving in December 2021, after delivering his traditional Christmas speech from the main balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The pope will meet with a Canadian delegation to discuss housing schools next week. (Yara Nardi / Reuters)
He and other representatives will meet with Pope Francis and talk to him about the legacy of pain left behind by home schools.
Fontaine said he wanted to see the Pope apologize in person to Canada one day.
He believes that the discovery of insignificant graves, believed to be of missing children, in school premises last year will add pressure on the Pope to fully address the shameful story.
“It has leaked and it is now reaching the top, and it can not get out of it,” Fontaine said. “It must be addressed.”
Previous apologies
In the spring of 2009, Fontaine traveled to Rome with a delegation from the Assembly of the First Nations.
There he met the former pope, Pope Benedict XVI, who expressed “regret” over the “deplorable” treatment of indigenous students in government-funded Roman Catholic schools.
But Benedict did not apologize.
A group of students and a nun pose in a classroom at Cross Lake Indian Residential School in Cross Lake, Man., In a photo from February 1940. It is estimated that more than 150,000 children attended home schools in Canada from the 1830s to The school was last closed in 1997. (Department of Indian and Northern Affairs / Library and Archives Canada / Reuters)
“It would have been a great achievement if we had persuaded Benedict XVI to apologize,” Fontaine said.
“But I did not want to leave the Vatican expressing public resentment or public frustration with the response. I wanted people to feel that they had been heard. I did not want people to see it as a great failure.”
Fontaine said he saw Pope Francis as a reformer and believed the church was more open than in the past.
“The time has come,” he said.
Judy Sackaney and her grandson Creedence, 10, stand in front of an honorary staff with smoke ties at the Centennial Flame in Ottawa in June 2021 after attending a ceremony to honor the 215 children whose remains are believed to have been found in on the premises of the former Kamloops Residential Indian school. (Justin Tang / The Canadian Press)
Fontaine plans to meet at the Vatican in Rome on Monday with representatives of the Métis National Council, the Assembly of First Nations and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. The delegation is planning a four-part presentation on Pope Francis between Monday and April 1st.
He said the delegation would not push for an immediate apology in Rome, as the Pope would prefer to travel to Canada to offer an apology to “our land”.
Meeting with Pope Francis
In October, Pope Francis agreed to visit Canada “on a pilgrimage of healing and reconciliation.”
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online.
“The Vatican is rich. They owe us for what they did,” Madeleine Whitehawk, a Cote First Nation survivor school in Saskatchewan, said in November.
Pope Francis is celebrating the 500th anniversary of Christianity in the Philippines at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome on March 14, 2021. He was scheduled to meet with Native Canadian representatives at the Vatican in December, but the meeting was scheduled for December 19. . (Tiziana Fabi / The Associated Press)
Pope Francis was scheduled to meet with representatives of the natives at the Vatican in December, but the meeting was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Regina Archbishop Don Bolen, who was appointed by Pope Francis in 2016, said while supporting the call for an apology, he acknowledged that there were divergent views within the church.
“I think the main thing that needs to happen is that the indigenous representatives … have the opportunity to speak with their hearts to Pope Francis and he has the opportunity to hear them and to hear them truly,” Bollen said.
He said Pope Francis had pledged to “work with people who have been persecuted, who have suffered a lot”.
Regina Archbishop Don Bolen, who was appointed by Pope Francis in 2016, says while supporting the apology call, he acknowledges that there have been divergent views within the church. (Radio Canada / CBC)
The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops has pledged $ 30 million to a Native Reconciliation Fund to help with reparations.
Fontaine said he believes the Roman Catholic Church’s historic response to what happened in residential schools has cost its members.
“The churches are empty and our people have moved away from the church in large numbers because they are very disappointed with the response and reaction of the Catholic Church,” he said.
The demands of the natives will not end in Rome or with an apology, Fontaine added.
A new landscape
The Vatican meeting comes in the wake of the worrying discovery of trivial burial sites on school land last spring. In May 2021, news broke that more than 200 burial sites had been uncovered following the use of ground penetration radar to investigate the site of the former Kamloops Residential Indian school in British Columbia.
The discovery was only the first of many in other former residential school locations in Canada.
Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Leader) Rosanne Casimir described finding the landfill as a “heavy truth”.
A ground penetration radar used at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia has shown that the remains of 215 children could be buried at the site. Last year’s discovery was just the first of many in other former residential school locations in Canada. (Andrew Snucins / The Canadian Press)
By the end of 2021, surveys of at least nine sites had uncovered 1,300 potentially insignificant landfills.
Fontaine said he, like many Canadians, was surprised by the findings.
“It was just as shocking to me that this situation existed in so many parts of the country where we had home schools,” he said, adding that the challenge now is how to deal with such discoveries.
Fontaine said he believes it is important to know the names of any of the children buried and to identify which communities they come from.
As a member of the Sagkeeng First Nation, he said the community knew some children who dropped out of boarding schools and ended up missing.
“These situations were not a big secret that was only revealed 50 or 100 years later, as we have seen in other parts of the country.”
How many were lost?
Determining the exact number of children who died in boarding schools is problematic. It is estimated that more than 150,000 children attended home-based schools in Canada from the 1830s until the last school closed in 1997. Ground penetration radar surveys are ongoing or under consultation in dozens of former school premises. Raymond Frogner, head of archives for the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg, which holds the files compiled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said the center has documented 4,118 children who died in boarding schools. However, he told the CBC that there were thousands of files left to review, so that number was expected to rise. Children’s shoes and stuffed animals sit on the steps of the former Mohawk Institute’s residential school in Bradford, OD, in honor of the missing children in November 2021. (Cole Burston / AFP / Getty Images)
“My experience was not unique”
Given the extent of what is now known, Fontaine said: “I am sure that people will not be satisfied until something real emerges from the meeting with Pope Francis at the Vatican.”
The longtime Indigenous leader attended the Fort Alexander Residential School, operated by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, in Sagkeeng, and later the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg.
The Fort Alexander Residential School closed in 1970. Fontaine attended the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate School in Sagkeeng First Nation before attending the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg. (George Harris Fonds / Archives of Manitoba)
In an interview with Barbara Frum in 1990, Fontaine discussed how children handled everything from corporal punishment to humiliation. He said some people who were abused later acted on what was done to them as they faced “missing gaps and fragments in their existence”.
At the time of the interview, Fontaine said Canadians and Indigenous peoples were not ready to hear such a truth in a public forum.
However, the recent discovery of unmarked graves in schools has led the public to pay attention.
Fontaine said he did not even think that …
