Correspondent Tim O'Brien travels to Ontario and talks to Anaskan, other plaintiffs, and their lawyer about their charges. O'Brien also talks to Arch Deacon Jim Boyle of Canada's Anglican Church about the potential fiscal consequences to the Church.


TIM O'BRIEN: Starting in the late 1800s and continuing through 1970, Canada's leading churches ran dozens of residential schools -- like the Mohawk Institute, 60 miles north of Toronto -- all aimed at integrating more than a hundred thousand Indian children into the developing Canadian society.

But a growing number of Indians -- now almost 6,500 -- are suing the church, seeking an estimated 8 billion dollars in damages for physical and sexual abuse, and what they call "cultural genocide."

TONY MERCHANT (Attorney for Plaintiffs): The government of Canada decided, and the government of the United States made the same decision, that what they were going to do was take the Indian out of the Indian. And they established schools, and the process was to turn red children into white adults.

Particularly because they were Christian churches running them, they would say, "Don't speak that Pagan language. Indian language is the tongue of the devil," that kind of thing.

O'BRIEN: There was nothing voluntary about the schools. The Canadian government, also named as a defendant in the lawsuits, required Indian parents to surrender their children at tender ages -- and those who refused could be jailed. Many children were isolated from their families for lengthy periods.

Melvin George, a Cree Indian, was taken away from home when he was only about five years old.

MELVIN GEORGE (Cree Indian, Plaintiff): My father was the only parent, and, uh, I guess seeing him in tears, leaving him beyond, was about the worst ...

O'BRIEN: Attorney TONY MERCHANT represents more than 4,300 Indian plaintiffs; most of them, he says, were physically abused, and about 1,500 were sexually abused by school authorities:

MERCHANT: What happened was you'd have bad apples that would accumulate in these schools because they liked being there -- because they could perform as sexual predators -- and bad apples turned into bad barrels.

O'BRIEN: Marla Anaskan says she is still undergoing therapy for sexual assaults by a child care supervisor many years ago.

MARLA ANASKAN (First Nation's People, Plaintiff): He was supposed to be the man in charge of us, taking care of us. He's responsible for us. We're supposed to look up to these people and trust them; he broke that trust.