All Métis residential school survivors must be recognized, MNC president says – National

Many Métis residential school survivors continue to go unacknowledged — and that’s going to have to change if the government wants to reconcile with Indigenous people, a Métis leader says.

Speaking in an interview with The West Block‘s Mercedes Stephenson, Métis National Council (MNC) President Cassidy Caron said the papal apology for residential schools “wasn’t the end of that journey.”

“We as the Métis nation specifically have so much more work to do,” Caron said.

“There are many Métis residential school survivors who continue to go unrecognized, unacknowledged for the harms that they endured during their time at a residential school, a day school, convents.”

These institutions, Caron said, all sought to do “the same things” to Métis children that the residential schools “did to many Indigenous children across the country.”

Residential “schools” were schools in name only, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) final report. Children were ripped from their homes and placed in these institutions, where they’d be systematically stripped of their culture and, in many cases, subjected to horrific abuses.

More than 38,000 of the children sent to residential schools were subjected to sexual and serious physical abuse, according to the TRC.

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The TRC’s final report found there were at least 4,100 deaths at residential schools across Canada. In recent years, using ground penetrating radar technology, Indigenous communities across Canada have been leading searches of residential school sites.

So far, more than 1,300 suspected graves have been found.

Despite facing the same abuses as their First Nations and Inuit counterparts, Métis communities have found themselves on the fringes of some of the reconciliation processes aimed at healing the wounds left by residential schools.

In 2006, when the…