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University of British Columbia president Santa J. Ono issued a statement of apology Monday for the university’s role in the Indian residential school system, a system that persisted for more than a century until the last school closed in 1996. Ono made the apology at the opening of the university's new Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre.
Ono said in his apology that universities bear partial responsibility for the history of the residential school system, which involved the forcible removal of indigenous children in Canada from their families and communities. Many students in the schools suffered emotional and in some cases physical or sexual abuse. Ono said in his apology statement that at some schools the mortality rate exceeded 60 percent.
“Universities bear part of the responsibility for this history, not only for having trained many of the policy makers and administrators who operated the residential school system, and doing so little to address the exclusion from higher education that the schools so effectively created, but also for tacitly accepting the silence surrounding it,” Ono said. “In years past, even after the signing of human rights declarations and ethics agreements that followed World War II, university professors conducted research on the residential schools that exploited their deplorable conditions without attempting to change them.”
