As Pope Says Sorry to Canadian Indians, Does He Even Know What He’s Apologizing for?

By Selwyn Duke

There are 7,000 beautiful stories people aren’t hearing, including his own, famous Cree playwright Tomson Highway said about Canada’s much-maligned Indian residential schools. “Nobody’s interested in the positive, the joy in that school [I attended],” he elaborated, talking to the now-defunct Huffington Post Canada in 2015. “Nine of the happiest years of my life I spent at that school. I learned your language…. Have you learned my language? No, so who’s the privileged one and who is underprivileged?”

Highway speaks for many Canadian Indians. Despite this, Pope Francis is now in Alberta apologizing for the very institutions the playwright was defending. The issue involves Francis because the schools, though created and funded by Canada’s government, were largely administered by the Catholic and Protestant churches.

The pope is issuing his mea culpa for missionaries’ “policies of forced assimilation and abuse” “that Indigenous children endured at mostly church-run residential schools,” to combine two matter-of-fact “hard news” statements made by ABC News and The Guardian, respectively, as the mainstream media harmonizes its message on this story. But how does this jibe with Highway’s testimonial or, for that matter, a now-deceased woman chief’s claim that many alleging abuse are lying for money? Are these unheard Indians masochists?

Or are the mainstream media sadistically mangling the Truth?

Read the rest here.