Survivors of Canada's residential schools on Monday asked Pope Francis for unfettered access to church records at the institutions, which indigenous children were forced to attend and where they were often abused.
The Pope met for about an hour each with representatives of the Metis and Inuit nations, the first of four meetings this week with Canada's native peoples in what both sides have called a called a process of healing and reconciliation.
More than 1,300 unmarked graves have been discovered since last May at church-run schools attended by Canada's indigenous children as part of a government policy of forced assimilation.
“It was a very comfortable meeting,” Cassidy Caron, president of the Metis National Council, told reporters afterwards.
She added that the Pope listened attentively as three elderly survivors told their stories.
The Catholic Church played a leading role in Canada’s residential school system, in which thousands of young indigenous Canadians were forcibly removed from their homes and stripped of their language and culture.
This meeting comes after the discovery of unmarked graves at the sites of several former residential schools, also called boarding schools, across Canada last year.
The stated intent of the schools, which operated between 1831 and 1996, was to assimilate indigenous children. They were run by several Christian denominations on behalf of the government, mostly by the Catholic Church.
“He repeated 'truth, justice and healing' [in English] and I take that as a personal commitment, so he has personally committed to those three actions,” she said.
“I felt some sorrow in his reactions … we shared a lot with him,” Ms Caron said.
About 150,000 children were taken from their homes to residential schools over the course of the 160-year programme. Many were subjected to abuse, rape and malnutrition in what Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 called “cultural genocide".
Ms Caron said the topic of records came up during the conversation with Pope Francis. Records are held in Canada in the archives of religious orders and possibly in the archives of the Vatican's missionary department.
“The Metis nation needs to be sure to understand our full truth and that will be unfettered access to church records and we will be speaking more with the Pope on this,” she said.
Canada's indigenous peoples and the Canadian government want the Pope to visit Canada to make an apology there for the Catholic Church's role in the schools.
Ms Caron said she was not disappointed that the Pope did not apologise on Monday because indigenous people want him to do so in Canada.
She said she expected that trip to be “soon”. Vatican sources have said it will likely be this summer.
“While the time for acknowledgement and apology and atonement is long overdue it is never too late to do the right thing,” she said. “Now it is [the Pope's] turn to join us in that work,” she said.
A Vatican statement said the Pope had a “desire to listen and make space for the painful stories of the survivors".
Scandal broke out last year with the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the former Indian Residential School in Kamloops in the western Canadian province of British Columbia.
The discovery at the school, which closed in 1978, reopened old wounds and brought fresh demands for accountability. Hundreds more unmarked burial sites have been found since.
Agencies contributed to this report
