The Canadian Government Is Withholding Documents Concerning the Torture of Children | VICE United States

2.10.13

The Canadian Government Is Withholding Documents Concerning the Torture of Children | VICE United States - The testimony they amassed by talking to hundreds of survivors of St. Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany Ontario was horrifying. The investigation provided 7,000 pages of stories that wouldn’t be out of place in memoirs of concentration camp survivors, or of individuals trapped in a country where ethnic cleansing is a government policy. The accounts of physical and sexual abuse are brutal and numerous—hetero and homosexual child rape, children being beaten with strops and rudimentary whips, forced ingestion of noxious substances (rotten porridge that children would throw up and then be forced to eat), sexual fondling, forced masturbation… the list goes on and on. But one of the most appalling and debasing examples of the indignity and the abuse suffered by children at St. Anne’s is that of being strapped down and tortured in a homemade electric chair—sometimes as a form of punishment—but other times just as a form of amusement for the missionaries, who, while committing these acts, were supposedly the ones “civilizing” the “Indians.”