Quote:
Originally Posted by bizaro86
I never learned about it in school except for a few passing mentions in high school.
But both my kids (kindergarten and grade 1) came home from pink shirt day and told me about residential schools and how kids were taken from their families for being different. While that in no way makes up for hiding it in the past, at least that is progress on acknowledging it now.
And this discovery is truly horrifying. I really hope there is an "epidemic" type explanation but I'm not optimistic.
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My dad was molested as a child for years at a catholic convent school (would have been the late 50s 60s). It was a standard practice at the time for boys to go to convents for a few years. He's never talked about it and it totally damaged him. I only found out about it very late and not to myself, but through my aunt. Stories like his would never make it to the news because these secrets are kept hidden by the victims of the acts. For every priest that was outed, there was probably hundreds that were not.
And he was a white boy at the time. What would have happened to a native girl that is seen as a subhuman that needed to be assimilated to the Canadian catholic life in the first half of the 20th century? We only know the parts that were allowed to be let out in the open.