Canada reopens 'disgraceful chapter'

After decades of foot-dragging, Canada is finally about to take a close look at what one aboriginal leader calls "the single most disgraceful, harmful and racist act in our history".

From the 1870s to the 1970s, around 150,000 native Indian children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to distant residential schools, where many say they were abused mentally, physically and sexually.

Conditions in the schools - run by various churches on behalf of the government - were sometimes dire. Contemporary accounts suggest up to half the children in some institutions died of tuberculosis.