Pope seeks forgiveness for genocide

Pope Francis, who visited Canada on a "pilgrimage of penance" last week, said the treatment of the country's Indigenous people amounted to genocide.

The 85-year-old pontiff made the comments on his flight back to Rome after the six-day tour in Canada, where he apologized to Indigenous survivors of abuse at residential schools run by the Catholic Church.

"I didn't use the word genocide (in Canada) because it didn't come to mind, but I did describe it," he told reporters onboard.

Instead of using the term genocide, the pope described the attempts at destroying Indigenous peoples through assimilation and colonization.

"To take away children, to change the culture, their mindset, their traditions－to change a race, an entire culture … yes, I (now) use the word genocide," he said. "And I asked for forgiveness for this process which was genocide. I condemned it, too."

In the visit that ended on Friday, the pope was seeking reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples. He expressed sorrow, indignation and shame throughout his Canadian visit.

Between 1881 and 1996, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and brought to residential schools. Many children were starved, beaten and sexually abused in a system that Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, called "cultural genocide".

According to the records gathered by the commission, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Winnipeg has so far documented 4,118 children who died at residential schools. The causes of death included physical abuse, malnutrition, disease and neglect. Others died by suicide, or by trying to escape from the schools.

'Shameful chapter'

The discovery in May last year of the remains of 215 children at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, uncovered what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a "dark and shameful chapter" of the country's history. Since then, more than 1,100 unmarked graves have been discovered at former residential school sites across the country.

Indigenous leaders have been calling on the church to apologize for its role in the residential school system for decades. Many Indigenous groups have amended what the commission termed "cultural genocide" to "genocide", and the messaging was ramped up before and during the pope's visit.

Last year, Leah Gazan, a member of Parliament for Manitoba's New Democratic Party, tabled a motion for Parliament to recognize the residential school history as genocide, as she believes it meets the definition of genocide drafted by the United Nations. The motion failed to gain unanimous consent.

The UN defines genocide as a number of acts committed with the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national ethnical, racial or religious group" such as killing members, inflicting bodily or mental harm to members, deliberate physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intending to prevent births within a group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls concluded in its final report that violence against women and girls is a form of genocide.

Neglect, along with physical and sexual abuse, was rampant in the schools, 60 percent of which were run by the Catholic Church, according to The Canadian Press.

The residential school system was part of a broader project of assimilation that the Canadian government developed partly as its economic interests and need for land shifted, according to Wendy Fletcher, principal and vice-chancellor of Renison University College, University of Waterloo, and a professor of religious studies and social work.

"I believe that the policies of assimilation practiced in Canada were both cultural genocide and genocide more broadly," Fletcher told China Daily.

"Although there was not an overt policy of killing Indigenous peoples, the policies implemented by the government and run by the church led to the death of countless Indigenous persons," she said.

Jennifer Wood, of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, told CBC: "It's about time that they use this kind of words to describe what happened to our people."