RE:RE:RE:Read this news carefullyDuring the long period from 1879 to 1986, the Canadian church/state residential schools were poorly constructed and ill-maintained, overcrowded, unsanitary, under-funded and operated by for the most part by incompetent teachers, staff and administrators. Native children suffered from poor diet, lack of proper medical attention, malnutrition, disease, overt racism, physical and mental abuse and from sexual predation among the staff. Their education was primarily an extremely substandard, regimented and deficient third rate vocational training, limited to preparing them for subservient wage slavery in menial jobs in the capitalist society of the White Man’s world. Similar conditions persisted in the United States. Children were literally stolen from their parents and suffered terribly from systematic cultural genocide and denigration of their own cultural and religious traditions. For even minor indiscretions children in the schools suffered cruel corporal punishment, a practice anathema to North American Native Indian Cultures. Native parents would never inflict violence upon the ir children. The children in the Residential Schools perished in alarming numbers most commonly from tuberculosis due to the squalid conditions. Many children who died were buried in graveyards near the schools and others terminally ill were sent back to their parents on the reservations to die. Many others died from exposure after escaping from these dens of iniquity in an effort to return to their families. When the children finally emerged from these dysfunctional factories called “schools” in their late teens, the vast majority had suffered severe emotional and physical trauma and returned to their reserves poorly educated and ill prepared for either the native or white man’s world. Most succumbed to alcohol and drug abuse that continued through subsequent generations. Even after the War when the patterns of abuse became evident to government officials, they continued unabated until the last school was shut down in 1986.