Lheidli T’enneh Chief pleased with Pope’s plans to visit Canada

Pope Francis will be visiting Canada to help reconciliation efforts with Indigenous people.

He’s been invited by the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, following the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former residential school sites across the country.

Back in July, Lheidli T’enneh Chief Dolleen Logan called on the pope to come and apologize on Canadian soil, after being notified that a group of Canadian Indigenous leaders would be heading to Italy to ask for an apology.

Chief Logan now says she was ecstatic to hear the news of his visit.

“I was at a loss for words. To me, it’s like, thank you for listening. Thank you for coming to Canada and hopefully to Kamloops and apologize to everybody. We shouldn’t have to ask for an apology and we shouldn’t pick, First Nations’ shouldn’t have to pick certain members to go and ask for an apology,” she stated.

She hopes Pope Francis comes and makes a heartfelt apology, not something prewritten so that Indigenous people can begin to heal and start on the path to reconciliation.

“They need closure, our elders the ones that have been to residential schools, they need acknowledgment of what they went through and what intergenerational trauma was caused. It’s something for them,” Chief Logan added.

She adds acknowledgment from the catholic church could be extremely beneficial to those trying to recover from the trauma caused by the residential school system, as the catholic church operated three-quarters of those schools.

“Thousands of Indigenous children attended Catholic-run residential schools between the mid-1800s and as late as the 1990s. Too many died while in the care of Catholic Priests and Nuns and many more suffered terrible abuses.  The impacts on the families of those kids who did not make it home from residential school is evident today. The impacts on the residential school survivors and their families is equally as devastating.”