Powerful documentary probes the shameful story of hundreds of residential schools in Canada, largely run by the Catholic church, that subjected pupils to horrific abuse
This deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary is about the
hundreds of residential “Indian schools”
for Indigenous children in Canada, largely administered by the Catholic church from the 1930s until the 1990s. It highlights the grotesque scandal of one in particular: the St Joseph’s Mission school in British Columbia (long since closed) where Indigenous children were routinely subject to physical and sexual abuse, with girls impregnated by their rapist-abusers. Some prosecutions of individual priests were brought. Reports were made. But very clearly, this hardly scratches the surface.
The film-makers speak to community members in
the Sugarcane Reserve
in British Columbia near the hated school and we get some sense of
the pain and inherited trauma
. But more than that:
new radar technology
is now revealing babies’ graves around the school’s property and the film recounts the case in 1959 of a newborn baby apparently abandoned by an Indigenous mother and fortuitously rescued from a garbage incinerator by a dairyman who happened to hear crying. We hear a trial report: the mother was sentenced to a year in jail with the judge sternly noting that had the baby not been found in time, this would have been a murder charge. But on that subject … if the school were simply quietly allowing these rape victims’ babies to die and get buried or disposed of, then wouldn’t that also be homicide?
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