Comment

DonnaMeness
Mar 23, 2019
The reverberations of residential school trauma echo down through the internal cruelties within our communities.. intergenerational sexual abuse, a dark legacy connected to almost 120 years of government-sanctioned, church-operated residential schools, where aboriginal leaders say many First Nations, Metis and Inuit children were physically and sexually molested by clergy and other staff, spawning a cycle of mimicked behaviour in generations to come. Extensive interviews with social scientists, indigenous leaders and victims undertaken over the past few months by The Canadian Press suggest child sexual abuse is an open secret in many aboriginal communities -- and its prevalence in some is shockingly high. "Few came out of residential schools having learned good boundaries, and good boundaries included some sense of self-determination, sovereignty over your own body," says Sylvia Maracle, executive director of the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres, based in Toronto. "They didn't have any control over that, and they didn't see people around with appropriate behaviour and being respectful of them as human beings, that they were sacred. And they were abused, " says Maracle, a Mohawk from eastern Ontario's Tyendinaga First Nation. "Children learn what they live and that was their life." https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/emotional-damage-from-trauma-of-childhood-sexual-abuse-can-last-a-lifetime-1.3159307 https://www.eaglefeathernews.com/quadrant/media//pastIssues/August_2010.pdf second article on first page https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/rsrcs/pblctns/brgnl-gngs-nvstgtn-2006/index-en.aspx