Roundup: Canadian gov't takes responsibility for abuse of aboriginal children

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday that the country and the government will accept full responsibility for the abuse of aboriginal children in residential schools.

Trudeau made the remarks at a ceremony marking the release of a report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The report is based on a six-year inquiry into the systemic abuse of some 150,000 indigenous students who attended the former Canadian government-funded, Christian church-run residential schools for over a century.

Trudeau said his Liberal government has agreed to all of the commission's calls to action and has begun acting on one to design a national inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women and girls -- there are more than 1,100 documented such cases in Canada.

"Our goal," Trudeau told hundreds of residential school survivors who attended the event, "is to accept fully our responsibilities -- and our failings -- as a government and as a nation."

Seven-and-a-half years ago, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered a full apology to survivors in the House of Commons and said the "burden" of their experience "is properly ours as a government, and as a country."

The 3,231-page report also included 94 recommendations for the country's all levels of government to repair the harm caused to the indigenous students.

"These residential schools were created for the purpose of separating aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture ... of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society," said the report.

"Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers, that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world," it added.

The report is conducted as part of the Canadian federal court-approved Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement the Canadian government implemented in 2007, which also set a 2-billion Canadian dollar (1.5 billion-U.S. dollar) compensation fund for some 86,000 school survivors.

The commission identified 3,201 deaths due to tuberculosis, malnutrition and other diseases as well as poor living conditions at residential schools, noting in its report that "many students sent to the schools never returned (and) were lost to their families, (and that) no one took care to count how many died or to record where they were buried."

At Tuesday's ceremony, two chairs were left empty on the stage to symbolize the children who died.

More than 37,950 school survivors have filed compensation claims for injuries resulting from physical and sexual abuse as of Jan. 31, 2015, and less than 50 former residential school staff members were convicted for sexually or physically abusing indigenous students.

The legacy of residential schools, the last one of which closed in 1996, "continues to this day (and) is reflected in the significant educational, income, and health disparities between aboriginal people and other Canadians -- disparities that condemn many aboriginal people to shorter, poorer, and more troubled lives" and is reflected in "intense racism" against them, said the report. Endi