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Anchor: Antonia Gonzales
The first group of Canada’s Indigenous delegates and residential school survivors have met in Rome with Pope Francis. As Dan Karpenchuk reports, they’re hoping to secure a papal apology for the role of the Catholic Church in Canada’s residential school system.
It’s a week-long event with members of the Metis Nation and Inuit having met with the pope on Monday. The president of the Metis National Council, Cassidy Caron, says she asked the pope to join her people on their journey for truth, reconciliation, healing and justice, adding that he acknowledged that as his personal responsibility.
Caron was joined by several residential school survivors who told the pope their stories. The Catholic Church operated scores of the government funded residential schools across the country. As many as 150,000 Native children were forced to attend the schools, thousands were abused, many died. Natan Obed is the president of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. He also met with the pope and says an apology is extremely important.
“Apologies matter and they may not be the same thing to every single person who’s being apologized to, but really the idea is a human level, the church acknowledges the human rights abuses, the pain and suffering, intergenerational trauma, and cares enough about Indigenous people to make that apology even if some people won’t accept it.”
In addition to a public apology, delegates want the church to return Indigenous artifacts and land, provide funding to help survivors heal, and provide access to church records about the schools. This visit comes after as many as 2,000 unmarked graves were found at several former residential school sites in the past year. First Nations delegates are scheduled to meet with the pope on Thursday. Expectations are high that the pope will travel to Canada at some point, to make an apology.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has announced tax-deductible donations to hundreds of organizations adding up to nearly $4 billion. Alice Fordham reports one donation is set to transform a New Mexico nonprofit serving Native American elders around the country.
The National Indian Council on Aging, headquartered in Albuquerque, received $4 million from Scott, who is the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Navajo Nation executive director Larry Curley says the donation was astounding.
“I’m excited, the staff are excited. And it’s, quite frankly, the largest donation that the organization has ever received in this 40 years of existence.”
Curley says the group is brainstorming how best to spend the money to further his organization’s work of supporting elders from American Indian and Alaska Native communities across the country. He says one issue that’s a priority is communication in places where internet-based support isn’t an option.
“We’re looking at the possibility of creating a 24/7 crisis call center for our tribal elders.”
Curley says the donation opens up horizons for the organization, which strives to help a group with high levels of poverty and stark healthcare disparities compared with the wider population of the U.S.
President Biden’s fiscal year 2023 budget request invests in Indian Country to address missing and murdered Indigenous people and help address gender-based violence. The budget proposes more than $600 million in tribal public safety and justice funding at the Interior Department to continue MMIP efforts in collaboration with the Justice Department. It also includes $35 million to support underserved and tribal communities for culturally-specific violence against women programs, and nearly $70 million for the FBI to address violent crime against children in Indian Country.
Other areas for tribes in the proposal, which was released Monday, include health care, education, housing and broadband.
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