The 85-year-old pontiff arrived in Edmonton, Alberta, on Sunday for a six-day visit to the country, which has been awaited for years by these Amerindian peoples including First Nations, Métis and Inuit.
At the heart of this “penitential pilgrimage”, the painful chapter of “residential schools” for indigenous children, a system of cultural assimilation which caused at least 6,000 deaths between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s and created trauma for many generations.
The Canadian government, which has paid billions of dollars in reparations to former students, officially apologized 14 years ago for creating these schools set up to “kill the Indian in the heart of the child “.
And the Anglican Church then did the same. But the Catholic Church, in charge of more than 60% of these boarding schools, has always refused to do so so far.
In April, everything changed with the apology of Pope Francis who had promised to come to Canada. Thousands of indigenous people are now waiting for an apology on their land.
François will go at 10 a.m. (4 p.m. GMT) to Maskwacis, an Aboriginal reserve about 100 km south of Edmonton, where the former Ermineskin boarding school is located, one of the largest in Canada, open from 1895 to 1975.
After a silent prayer in the cemetery, he will deliver his first speech, in Spanish, in front of thousands of people, including former boarding school students.
Psychological help will be offered to participants, who come from all over the country.
The pope will then travel at 4:30 p.m. (2230 GMT) to the Church of the Sacred Heart of the First Peoples of Edmonton, one of the oldest in the city, rebuilt after a fire in 2020.
He will deliver a second speech there in front of the indigenous communities.
– “Healing journey” –
“I hope this visit is the beginning of a change in history and a way for us to begin our healing journey,” said George Arcand Jr., Grand Chief of the Confederacy of Treaty First Nations. 6, on Canadian public television.
In April, the Holy Father had for the first time apologized to the Vatican for the role played by the Church in the 130 boarding schools in the country, castigating the “ideological colonization” and the “action of assimilation” of which “so many ‘children were victims’.
Some 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly recruited into these schools, where they were cut off from their family, language and culture and often subjected to physical, psychological and sexual violence.
Little by little, Canada is opening its eyes to this past described as “cultural genocide” by a national commission of inquiry: the discovery of more than 1,300 anonymous graves in 2021 near these boarding schools created a shock wave.
Long-awaited, the papal visit therefore raises a lot of hope among some survivors and their families. Many also hope for symbolic gestures, such as the repatriation of some and indigenous art objects kept in the Vatican for decades.
“To me, it means a lot that he came. I think at some point you have to forgive” even if “a lot of things were taken away from us,” said Deborah Greyeyes, a 71-year-old Edmonton resident and native of a Cree community (the latter represent the largest Aboriginal group in the country).
On Tuesday, the pope will celebrate a mass at Commonwealth stadium in Edmonton and will travel to Lac Sainte-Anne, site of an important annual pilgrimage. He will then join Quebec on Wednesday before a last stop on Friday in Iqaluit (Nunavut), a city in the far north of Canada in the Arctic archipelago.
Still weakened by knee pain, the Argentinian Jesuit appeared in a wheelchair on Sunday but smiling when he arrived in Edmonton. His program has been arranged to limit his travels, according to the organizers.