Funding for education, healing and cultural revival programs were among major recommendations in an interim report by the commission probing the legacy of the residential school system.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report recommends that the federal, provincial and territorial governments act to support healing by establishing — and ensuring resources for — health and wellness centres focused on childhood trauma, long-term grief and culturally appropriate treatment.
Tk'emlups Chief Shane Gottfriedson attended a national justice forum in Vancouver where the report was released. The Kamloops Residential School operated until 1977 and many TIB members attended as "day scholars."
"One of the biggest recommendations made is that the education system needs to look at having more information in the system to make people aware," Gottfriedson said. "The reality we face is the need to educate as many people as we can."
Reconciliation demands that the damaged relationship between Aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians be repaired, the report stresses.
"Canadians have generally been led to believe — by what has been taught and not taught in schools — Aboriginal people were and are uncivilized, primitive and inferior, and continue to need to be civilized," it states.
But many of the stereotypes stem from the residential school system, said Salamiva Weetaluk, a former student.
"Nobody is making the connection. Bad Indians. Bad Inuit. Drunken Inuit. Drunken Indians. That's all they think," she said in her testimony to the commission. "But we would not be drunken Inuit or drunken Indians had we not been abused when we were children, had we not been exposed to assault and stuff like that."
Barney Williams, another former student, said the report is proof that many of the 150,000 aboriginal children who went to the residential school systems suffered horrible neglect or physical and sexual abuse. He was "not quite seven" when he was first sexually assaulted, he stated matter of factly. "Pedophiles have their victims. They used you for a while until they found another victim."
It's a story he's told all over Canada, but he said many still don't believe that something so horrible could be part of Canada's history.
"A lot of people I talked to would say 'Well, gee, you know priests and nuns would never do that,' that's the belief right," he said. "I'm saying 'Well you know what? They did that because my abusers were both male and female.' "
That's why he feels the commission's recommendation to use the education system to tell students what happened is a key part of the report.
"It's going to take a lot of work to convince the general public that this really happened. There is still doubt among the general population."
Justice Murray Sinclair, the commission's chairman, said panel members were struck by the amount Canadians don't know about aboriginal people and the sorry legacy of residential schools. He called on the government to mount a public information campaign to educate Canadians.
It took 130 years to get to this point in the process, Sinclair said, and it may take that long again for First Nations to recover from the abuse.
Commissioner Marie Wilson told reporters that because the residential school stain was never taught in Canadian schools, no one knew what happened to generations of aboriginals.
"We have all been the losers for lack of that knowledge and understanding. It has led us to a place of stereotypes and judgment."
The commission was set up to help First Nations heal from abuses in the system that was "an assault" on aboriginal children, their families and their culture, the interim report said.
Aboriginal children were taken from their families and forced to attend the schools, the first of which opened in the 1870s and the last of which closed in 1996.
The commission makes 20 recommendations in its interim report, including a call for the federal government to distribute a framed copy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's historic formal apology to residential school survivors.
