The pope's apology in Canada was historic, but for some Indigenous people, not enough (npr.org)

Years after a Canadian-government-funded commission issued findings detailing a history of physical and sexual abuse of Indigenous children in the country's Catholic-run residential schools, Pope Francis on Monday issued an apology on Canadian soil.

"I am sorry," the pope said, speaking in Maskwacis, Alberta, at the lands of four Cree nations.

"I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples," Francis said near the site of the former Ermineskin Indian Residential School, where ground-penetrating radar has been used to try to locate unmarked graves of students who died while attending the school.

he residential schools forcibly separated Indigenous children from their parents as part of an effort to convert them to Christianity and assimilate them into the wider Canadian culture. In total, 150,000 children from Canada's First Nations tribes were placed in 139 schools run under government contract — most by the Catholic Church — over a 150-year period.

A 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission report prompted by the harrowing tales of survivors concluded that "[children] were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country."

The schools were designed "not to educate" the Indigenous children, "but primarily to break their link to their culture and identity," the report said. It concluded that the establishment and operation of the schools "can best be described as 'cultural genocide.'"

To read more of Scott Neuman's article, please click here.