PM to Apologise for Canada's Treatment of Native Americans

The Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, was yesterday scheduled to apologize for one of the darkest episodes in the country's history: the inhumane treatment of native Americans spanning two centuries.

The Canadian government issued a general apology in 1998 but Harper's apology yesterday will be aimed at 150,000 students, many of whom were forcibly taken from their homes as part of a strategy aimed at destroying their culture and enforcing assimilation. Some were put in residential schools where mistreatment included sexual abuse.

One of them, Michael Cachagee, who spent 12 years in three different schools from 1944, told Associated Press: "I was beaten. I was put in tubs of hot water. I suffered great pains of hunger. I was force-fed rotten food." He added: "The intent was to destroy the Indian."

Normal business at the House of Commons in Ottawa was due to be suspended while Harper delivered the apology. About 200 representatives from the country's estimated 1 million native American population, comprising mainly the First Nations, Metis and Inuit, were invited.

Harper told the Commons on Tuesday: "I hope that we will begin the process of healing."

This year, the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, issued a similar apology to the country's aborigines taken from their families as part of a similar assimilation program.

The Canadian apology comes two years after the government and the churches that ran the schools settled a lawsuit brought by victims, offering C$2bn (£1bn) compensation. The forced removal of the children began in the 19th century and continued until the 1970s. At the schools, children were forbidden to use their own languages and discouraged from learning about their own cultures.

A senior official in the Indian affairs department, Duncan Campbell Scott, wrote in 1920 that the aim was to "kill the Indian in the child" until "there is not a single American Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed". About 90,000 of the 150,000 students who went through the system are still alive.

Phil Fontaine, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, described this as Canada's "dark history". Grand Chief Weaselhead, who was among those invited to attend the Commons, said the apology was "monumental".

The native population makes up about 4% of Canada's population though it remains among the poorest. Canada was one of the few nations that last year voted against the UN declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples, saying that it would create constitutional problems.