What is an apology without justice?
When Doug George-Kanentiio was taken from his people’s native land in the 1960s at age 11, he was sent to a residential school in Brantford, Ontario.
Marjorie Kaniehtonkie Skidders’ mother was taken from the same territory in the 1930s when she was just 8, but she was sent to an institution south of the border instead: the Thomas Indian School in New York.
Today, Mr. George-Kanetiio and Ms. Skidders work on the committee for Akwesasne Mohawk residential school survivors, as chairperson and a board member respectively, to identify which Akwesasne Mohawk children never returned home because they died in such schools.
Their work spans the modern U.S.-Canada border just like the Indigenous territory itself, situated along the St. Lawrence River in parts of New York, Ontario, and Quebec. But they face two historical perpetrators that are in very different stages of acknowledgment and apology.
While Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the residential school system in 2008, the United States has never done so publicly. It has only recently begun a thorough examination of the harms wrought by forced
