OPINION. Earlier this month, a delegation of some 100 First Nations, Inuit and Métis representatives made a pilgrimage to the Vatican City to meet with Pope Francis and other Roman Catholic officials to discuss the scars that remain from Indian residential schools in Canada.

French national Johannes Rivoire, age 93, a former priest in Canada’s residential school system, has been charged in Canada with sexual assault, that allegedly happened decades earlier.

On Friday, the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS) issued a statement on Pope Francis' apology for the Roman Catholic Church's role in the mass abuse and mistreatment of Native children in Indian residential schools operated by the church.

For the first time in history, the leader of the Catholic Church in Vatican City, Rome, on Friday acknowledged the role of the church in perpetrating harm on the more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children sent to residential schools in Canada. 

The Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, or Ojibwe, as they call themselves, has been reckoning with its government boarding school for decades. The school was one of many strewn across North America that used abuse and intimidation to purge Indigenous culture and language out of Native American youth. The Lac du Flambeau have since wrestled with what to do with the old building and how to heal the community. Now, their historians and educators are working to restore and strengthen cultural ties for future generations. 

First Nation leaders and residential school survivors are in Rome, Italy, this week to ask Pope Francis for an apology for the Catholic Church’s more than 100-year role in operating Indian Residential Schools for Indigneous youth in Canada.

A bill introduced in the Michigan Legislature last month aims to encourage the State Board of Education to ensure that accurate history about Indian boarding schools is taught to grades 8th through 12th. Currently, some secondary schools already teach include Indian boarding schools history in their curriculum, but many people believe that there are not enough school districts that do. 

Eleanor Hadden (Tlingit, Haida,Tsimshian) told viewers of Native News Online’s An Indian Boarding School Discussion - Why Repatriation is Important  this past Mohday the poignant story of how her family has spent over five decadestrying to bring back the remains of her great-aunt Mary Kinninnook, who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, the nation’s first off-reservation Indian Boarding School, back to Alaska.

Another First Nation has found Indigenous children's graves on the grounds of a former Residential School.

When two Oyate boys, Edward Upright (Spirit Lake Nation) and Amos LaFromboise (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), left their homes in the Dakotas in 1879, they were 13 and 12 years old, respectively. They were each the son of a powerful tribal leader—Amos of Joseph LaFromboise, a founding father of his tribe, and Edward of Chief Waanatan—in line to become hereditary chiefs of their respective tribes when they grew older. Instead, they never left the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania: They both died before they turned 16, and remain buried in the cemetery beside the former school grounds.

Buried in the State of Michigan’s 2023 Budget Proposal, revealed earlier this month by Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), is a one-paragraph insertion that calls for a one-time appropriation for $500,000 to conduct a boarding school study.

The toll of unmarked graves holding the remains of Indigenous children in Canada increased by 54 yesterday following the announcement from Keeseekoose First Nation in Saskatchewan.

Arizona House Democrats have signed onto a bill asking the Department of the Interior take a closer look at former Indian boarding school grounds in their state.

The borough of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, voted last week to retire its logo depicting a crest flanked by a white man holding a rifle and a Native American man holding a bow and arrow above the Latin words Fiat Justicia meaning “Let justice be done.” Mayor Sean Shultz said the decision, reached last Wednesday in a unanimous borough council workshop, came from the realization that the current crest “has a naïve view of the relationship between Native Americans and westerners in this country, and specifically this area.”

The postponed December meeting between Indigenous leaders, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Pope Francis to discuss the church’s role in Residential Schools will now take place this spring, the groups announced yesterday.

The potential burial sites of at least 50 Indigenous children were found on the grounds of St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, a former Residential School in British Columbia, according to the first phase of the investigation led by the nearby Williams Lake First Nation (WLFN). 

When the news broke last May of a First Nations tribe in Canada using ground-penetrating radar to discover 215 unmarked graves of children at the site of a former Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, major media outlets all over the world picked up the story, but very few explained what ground-penetrating radar actually is and how it’s used. Native News Online included.

When Connie Leonard found out that the bodies of missing children had been found at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia, her body began to shake. 

An increasing number of Catholic organizations are joining the discussion about Indian boarding schools. But what role do they have to play in the pursuit of truth and healing, and who is their participation serving?