As an Aboriginal of the age of four to sixteen living in the 1800’s until the 1990’s, life was not diverting due to the Residential School systems. Canada has been struggling to gain the forgiveness of the Residential School attendants and gladly, they had finally accepted our apologies, but will they ever forgive themselves for not being one of us?
During the twentieth century, Residential Schools became widespread in all Canadian provinces and territories except Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. Aboriginal children had been seized from their homes and had been placed into these ‘boarding schools’. They had to do labour work, live with complete strangers, and also study the Canadian culture just to kill the Indian in the Child. The young children had to do all of this for the government while being abused. Sexually, physically and mentally. About one hundred and fifty thousand children were placed into this horrid living and only eighty thousand made it out alive as in two thousand and eight. In order for us to be forgiven, we did two acts that will never make up for what our country had done to them. We wrote a state of apology that was read in front of a crowd of survivors. We had also given each of them a generous amount of money as a materialistic apology. But how did the aboriginal community act upon the materialistic goods and apology? Has Canada as a whole done enough to heal the wounds of aboriginal students that had attended the Residential schools?
Firstly, Canada had a requirement to make an apology to the residential community. On June 11th, 2008, Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, made a Statement of Apology to former students of Indian Residential Schools, on behalf of the Canadian Government. These students had been stripped from their culture as well as their family and were abused. In the early 2000’s, the