Article #6145

First Nation communities warn that government must act as accounts face destruction, risking central part of Canada’s reckoning with its colonial past

• ‘Cultural genocide’: the shameful history of Canada’s residential schools – mapped

Cheryle Dreaver first heard her mother discus what she had endured as a child in a Winnipeg courtroom in 2008.

Ivy Dreaver was one of tens of thousands of Indigenous people in Canada invited by the federal government to testify about their experiences of sexual, physical and mental abuse in the country’s residential school system.

“At that time … I didn’t know those things had happened to her until that very day,” said Dreaver. “I was in shock … there was a lot of abuse.”