Survivors of Canada's 'cultural genocide' still healing
A report on Canada's history of separating indigenous children from their parents at abusive residential schools has called the practice "cultural genocide". But what does the proposed reconciliation mean for survivors?
In 1966, five-year-old Joseph Maud was separated from his family and sent to live at a Canadian residential school for indigenous students in Pine Creek, Manitoba.
Maud remembers it was like walking into an invisible brick wall - students were expected to speak English or French and Maud only spoke his native Ojibwa. If the students spoke their own language, ears were pulled and mouths were washed out with soap.
"But the greatest hurt was being separated from my parents, cousins and uncles and aunties," says Maud, who now lives about an hour from Pine Creek.
When the lonely little boy would wet the bed, his nun in charge of his dormitory would rub his face in his own urine.
"It was very degrading, humiliating. Because I'm sleeping in a dormitory with 40 other boys," he says. "It's bringing tears to my eyes right now just thinking about it."
The residential school survivor remembers kneeling painfully on the cement chapel floor, because the nuns told him 'that's the only way God hears you.'
A woman reacts to the release of the long-awaited TRC report
