Indigenous leaders and survivors of residential institutions are preparing to meet with Pope Francis in Vatican City next week, in what they hope is the first step towards the Pope travelling to Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in Canada’s brutal residential school system.
The historic meeting, which has been postponed once due to COVID-19 already, will take place at the end of March.
Separate delegations of Metis, Inuit and First Nations leaders will meet with the Pope, with the First Nations delegation set to speak to him on March 31.
In a press conference Thursday, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) said their number one demand to the Pope will be for an official apology on Canadian soil.
“They must be accountable and acknowledge their responsibility for the great harm caused by their direct role in the institution of assimilation and genocide that they ran,” Gerald Antoine, AFN Northwest Territories Regional Chief, Dene Nation, and the lead for the First Nations delegation, said in the press conference.
The residential school system was conceived of and funded by the Canadian government, but the majority of the schools were operated by the Catholic Church.
“We seek justice,” Antoine said. “It is only then that we can begin walking truly on the healing path.”
He said that many Indigenous people have been asking him if the trip to the Vatican will result in the Pope actually coming to Canada to deliver the apology that has been called for.
“I think this is an issue which is long overdue,” he said. “In Canada, there are churches that have apologized, and Roman Catholic Church is the only one that hasn’t apologized.”
But he said they have hope.
“There is a really strong sense in all of us that this would happen.”
But an apology is not the only purpose of the visit.
The AFN do not only want gestures, but concrete actions. They said they will also be demanding the Church to return all Indigenous land back to its rightful First Nation, and to return all Indigenous artifacts from the Vatican.
They are also calling for the Church to deliver further investments for survivors and their families in longterm healing, beyond the commitment of $30 million that Canada’s Catholic bishops promised to raise in September 2021 for residential school survivors.
Their final demand is for the Pope to rectify a historic wrong: to rescind the 1493 doctrine of discovery used to justify the seizure of Indigenous land.
“There is something very significant that happened to Indigenous people and there’s a realization, I believe, on the Catholic Church’s part that they have to do more,” Grand Chief Mandy Gull-Masty, grand chief of the Cree Nation of Eeyou Istchee and the delegation’s Quebec representative, said.
Canada’s longest running chief of almost 40 years, Marie-Anne Day Walker-Pelletier, will be Saskatchewan’s representative for the AFN.
At 10 years old, she endured seven years of abuse at the Lebret Residential School, losing her language and culture.
“I want to be the voice of our survivors, our ancestors, and those children that never, ever came home,” she told CTV News. “So that is the whole reason that I agreed to participate.”
She said that different members of the delegation have been given specific topics to focus on in their brief window to speak about the varying impacts of residential schools.
“We’ve got a total of 10 minutes to tell the Pope our story,” she said.
It leaves her with only three minutes to talk to the Pope about the impacts of the hundreds of unmarked graves found last year at residential schools in Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc and Cowessess First Nation, among numerous other sites.
“He needs to come and tell our Mosoms and Kokums and our families and communities that he is truly sorry, that he needs to be there and it needs to come from his heart,” she said.
Her goal is clear: to convince Pope Francis to come to Canada and provide that official apology.
“Our job is to convince him […] to come to Canada in the very, very near future,” she said.
Pope Francis will also meet with Metis and Inuit delegations starting on Monday in Rome.
Although he has agreed to meet with residential school survivors in their traditional territories in Canada later this year, so far there has been no commitment on an actual date.
