Victoria McIntosh unfurls a little girl’s white winter coat from her handbag and smooths it out on the table.
Her grandmother sewed it for her when she was four years old, she says, before she was sent to Fort Alexander residential school in the 1960s. But a nun took the coat from her, she remembers.
“That nun took it off of me and threw it at my mom,” she told CNN. Then the nun called her mother a ‘savage” — an incident she said foreshadowed years of abuse.
McIntosh was sexually assaulted by a priest at that school for years, she says. “He violated me in ways that no child should ever go through. And I would break down and I would cry. Thinking about it, what he’d done. And I wonder why. What did I do to you?
Pope Francis himself arrived in Canada this week with a singular purpose — to apologize on Canadian soil directly and personally to indigenous peoples for the Catholic Church’s role in the government-funded residential school system.
In particular, the trip — which the Pope himself has called penance — recognizes the damage done to indigenous children who were taken from their families, banned from using their language, forced to abandon their culture, and in many cases abused physically, and sexually, and emotionally.
“Kneel down the way you made us. Kneel down as little kids and ask for that forgiveness,” McIntosh said of the Pope.
At least 150,000 Indigenous children were impacted across the country, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in September 2021, when Canada observed its first national holiday honoring victims and survivors.
