• Pope Francis is visiting Canada for six days.

  • This visit is mainly devoted to masses and meetings with indigenous peoples, while an apology from the Catholic Church is expected.

  • Between the end of the 19th century and 1996, the Church administered numerous boarding schools, in which Indian children were forcibly placed to cut them off from their culture of origin.

No, Pope Francis is not looking for freshness with his visit to Canada.

Thursday, it will also be a good 30 ° C under the blue sky of Edmonton, where the sovereign pontiff landed.

And far be it from him to proselytize, even though 44% of the country's population is Catholic.

No, the reason for this crossing of the Atlantic for the 85-year-old Argentinian can be summed up in two words: “penitential pilgrimage”.

A few weeks after an initial apology at the Vatican, the pope is expected to ask forgiveness from Indigenous, First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples.

Because if the story is little known in France, the role of the Catholic Church in the destruction of Native American identities in Canada is very real.

To understand this, we have to go back to the 1880s, when the federal government signed a partnership with the various churches to set up, on the United States system, a network of boarding schools for Aboriginal children.

"Killing the Indian in the Child's Heart"

The goal, while the settlers are more and more numerous and want to exploit the territory, is "to take the child away from his family, to cut him off from his culture of origin to facilitate his integration", explains to

20 Minutes

Franck Miroux, Doctor of Anglophone Studies specializing in Indigenous Peoples of Canada.

One motto suffices to sum up this objective: “Killing the Indian in the heart of the child”.

At that time, the Catholic Church administered about 60% of these boarding schools, financed by the Canadian government, in which 150,000 children would pass.

In these boarding schools, "the children experience violence, some are raped, but all have above all suffered the trauma of the cut with their family at the age of five or six", points out the associate professor of English.

Children “deprived of love and attention” in addition to their culture, who will then have “difficulty positioning themselves as parents”, become dysfunctional, violent or alcoholic.

The boarding schools, which closed their doors from the 1970s, “still have consequences for current generations”, says the researcher at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès.

The Vatican, the last mute

As the last two boarding schools closed in 1996, the first testimonies emerged.

"Where the natives were clever is that they took joint legal action", specifies Franck Miroux.

The Canadian government takes the lead before a possible criminal sanction, and puts in place “a settlement agreement with four components”, including two financial reparations, one relating to the memory of the residential schools.

The last consists of a "truth and reconciliation commission", at work between 2008 and 2015. It was also in 2008 that Canada and the various churches involved apologized.

But not the Catholic Church.

The wound opens again in 2019 and 2021, when more than 1,300 graves are unearthed near former boarding schools.

"No mass grave, no mass grave, as we might have said by mistake, but unmarked children's graves, whose parents were not informed", underlines the Toulouse researcher.

Again, the Vatican remains silent, and “this has caused a lot of misunderstanding and anger among the natives, churches have been burned in Western Canada.

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Soothe individual suffering

The visit of an indigenous delegation to the Vatican, then the apologies from Rome by the sovereign pontiff in April, marked the first steps towards sharing this painful memory.

The Pope's visit to Canada must confirm this.

"The symbolic issue is very important", insists Franck Miroux, who makes this visit a question of "personal suffering which can be appeased".

"I hope this visit is the beginning of a change in history and a way for us to begin our healing journey," said George Arcand Jr., Grand Chief of the Confederacy of Treaty #1 Nations. .

6, on Canadian public television.

Many also hope for symbolic gestures, such as the repatriation of some and indigenous art objects kept in the Vatican for decades.

But Franck Miroux sees no other direct consequences, since “the legal and financial aspect is closed”.

The pope's unprecedented trip, however, has another interest according to him: to bring to light "the situation of the indigenous communities, which remains very precarious".

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