Catholic schools for Native Americans, known for abuse and assimilation, try to do good
By Naomi Schaefer Riley - Washington Post
“The majority of the kids I went to school with are dead,” says Manny Jules, “because of the experience they had, the abuse.”
Jules, 63, is the former chief of the Kamloops band of First Nations in British Columbia. As a child, he attended a residential Catholic school, where he remembers students experiencing physical, sexual and emotional abuse while separated from their families and community.
This trauma, shared for decades by Native American youths across Canada and the United States who were sent to Catholic schools, is at least in part to blame for the high level of alcoholism, drug abuse and suicide in Indian communities.
Image by AP/Mary Hudetz
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