Hanging on the Pope’s every word in Quebec City on Thursday was a Metis man who just wants to be part of the conversation.
Louis Gardiner arrived in Quebec for this leg of the papal tour from Saskatchewan, seeking a response for a long standing grievance: the lack of acknowledgement for survivors of a residential school that was primarily for Metis children.
“We were never recognized when the settlement agreements were made,” Gardiner said.
From the 1860s right up to 1974, Metis and First Nations children in Northern Saskatchewan were forced to attend the Ile-a-la-Crosse Boarding school run by the province and the church.
Survivors of that school say they too endured systematic abuse and trauma.
“I was given a number, not a name,” Gardiner told CTV News.
While the students from First Nations received compensation as part of a multi-billion dollar Indian Residential School Settlement, the Metis, who also suffered at Ile-a-la-Crosse, were denied.
Ile-a-la-Crosse, primarily attended by Metis students, wasn’t included in settlements because it was run by the provincial government and the federal government, meaning it wasn’t officially considered to be a residential school, despite sometimes receiving federal funding.
While the federal government officially acknowledged in 2019 that harm was done at Ile-a-la-Crosse, the matter of compensation has still not been resolved.
“According to them, there is multiple reasons — which I only can look at them as excuses,” Duane Favel, mayor of Ile-a-la-Crosse and an intergenerational survivor, told CTV News.
The compensation battle revived old wounds. Although a Metis delegation was sent to the Vatican earlier this spring with First Nations and Inuit delegations to elicit the first apology from the Pope for the Catholic Church’s role in residential schools, Metis people have long felt left out of the conversation.
The Metis have historically fought for status, land and recognition, with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission finding that they had been “overlooked” in receiving acknowledgement for how residential schools impacted them.
With the Pope in the country, Gardiner is hoping for a resolution to the more than 20-year-old legal dispute.
“The Catholic [Church] needs to sit with the federal government and the province to negotiate a Metis residential school agreement for Ile-a-la-Crosse,” Gardiner said.
Gardiner never got close enough to the Pope to air his grievances in person, but is vowing to plead his case now to the cardinals.
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