Following Pope Francis’ week-long tour in Canada, during which he went from city to city apologizing for the atrocities of the Catholic Church-backed residential school system forced upon Indigenous children until the late 1990s, survivors are once again speaking up, and sharing their horrific experience.
“I spent four years at St. Anne’s residential school, and they were the worst years of my life,” survivor Evelyn Korkmaz told Anadolu News.
Korkmaz, now in their 60s, was raised in Fort Albany, an isolated Cree reservation located in Northeastern Ontario. At the age of 10, she started attending St. Anne, a school that is known for being one of the most terrifying in the country.
“There was an electric chair at St. Anne’s,”She told CTV News.
She said the horrors began on the first day, where students were forced to cut their hair and dress in a uniform. “We had numbers on our clothing, rather than calling me Evelyn,”She said.
Winters were particularly cold. Average Fort Albany temperatures can drop down to -7°f in January and February, and Korkmaz said there hadn’t been any heating at the school.
“I don’t know why it would be very cold in there,”She said. “Maybe they couldn’t afford the heating. I’m not sure, but, we had small blankets. It wasn’t very thick, you know? So you just cuddled up, tried to stay warm, keep active.”
Later, she saw her young classmates being taken by nuns and priests.
“Sometimes I would see a girl being taken from the line, or a boy taken from the line,” Korkmaz recalled. “I thought they were being bad, because you weren’t allowed to talk in the line-up.”
She stated that she had seen her classmates being taken from her in the middle of the nights.
“In the middle of the night, a girl or boy would be taken from their bed and taken down the hallway somewhere in the school,” Korkmaz said. “In the morning, you would see a little candy on their night table.”
She realized as an adult that the children she was raped were her own.
“I didn’t know that as a child,”She said “You don’t think that way as a child.”
Pitta Irniq, who attended Turquetil Hall in Canada’s far north as a child, told Inside Edition Digital in an interview last year that he and other Inuit children experienced and witnessed similar abuses.
“Many, many of us were sexually abused by the Grey nuns, by the brothers, by the Roman Catholic priest,”Irniq added that many of them survived by complying with their requests.
He was reminded of being punished for using his Inuktitut language. “[The teacher] motioned for me to come to the front of the class,” Irniq said. “And she hit me so hard with the ruler and said, ‘Don’t ever let me hear you speak that language again in this classroom.’”
Canada’s Government has acknowledged that the residential school program was a form of cultural genocide. The policy was described by Stephen Harper, former Prime Minister of Canada, as a “way”. “to kill the Indian in the child,” based on the idea that “Aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal,”All survivors received a formal apology in 2008.
While the Government of Canada has issued several national apologies alongside financial compensation packages to survivors over the years, Pope Francis’ visit last month was the first time the Catholic Church has apologized for its role in the residential school system.
Korkmaz called the apology too little and too late.
“I wasn’t happy with his apologies because you didn’t take ownership or accountability of what you, the church has done,”She spoke to Anadolu News.