MASKWACIS, Alberta — To this day, Flo Buffalo doesn’t drink milk — not since two nuns force-fed her the sour milk she had refused at the Catholic-run Ermineskin Indian Residential School for Indigenous children that she attended in the 1960s.
Holding out her right hand, she showed how she has never been able to fully straighten it out since a nun severely beat her with a stick.
“The nuns, they were real mean,” Buffalo said.
With international attention focusing on the former school in the prairie town of Maskwacis as Pope Francis visits Monday to apologize for abuses in a system designed to sever Native children from their tribal, family and religious bonds, Indigenous Canadians such as Buffalo are voicing a range of skepticism, wariness and hope. Read more…
