Canada's Indigenous residential schools: survivors recount systemic abuse | AFP

Beginning in the mid-1800s, about 150,000 Indigenous children were ripped from their families across Canada and placed in 139 schools meant to forcibly assimilate them into Canadian "culture" -- in other words, strip them of their native traditions. Thousands of students died, mostly from malnutrition, disease or neglect, in what a truth and reconciliation committee called "cultural genocide" in a 2015 report. Many others were physically or sexually abused. On the heels of the discovery of some 1,300 unmarked graves at these schools, Canada is finally starting to come to terms with the nationwide trauma -- and for thousands of survivors, the reckoning is reopening old, deep wounds. A Canadian Indigenous delegation announced it will travel in March to the Vatican to meet with Pope Francis and discuss abuses at these residential schools.