Canada apologises for Residential Schools . . .now what?

A mere 9 months after refusing to sign the U.N. declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, Stephen Harper formally apologises to  Canada’s Aboriginal peoples for a system of assimilation that has had destructive effects up until today. The residential school system, funded by the federal government and run by churches, isolated Aboriginal children from their families and communities so that they could more easily be assimilated into Euro-Canadian cultures. Inside the schools, siblings were seperated and children were forbidden to speak their languages or practice their culture in any way. Living conditions for these children were abhorrent: bad ventilation, overcrowding, bad heating in the winter and rotten food led to much illness and death. Furthermore, since the schools were badly funded, children were often forced to work on school grounds on tasks such as farming, cleaning and so forth rather than get an actual education.