Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission has released its findings into more than a century of abuse in Indian Residential Schools. Between the 1880s and 1990s 150,000 aboriginal children were sent to institutions where they were stripped of their language and culture. Many faced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
I wriggled my way through an expectant crowd in a ballroom of a downtown Ottawa hotel. It was standing room only. Several hundred people, among them former residential school students, known as "survivors" - many of them now elderly - stood shoulder to shoulder with camera crews.
The event was going to be broadcast and streamed live across the country. Rarely had an aboriginal-led event attracted such national attention. Everyone was waiting eagerly for the long-awaited findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
While this moment was the culmination of a seven-year inquiry, many survivors had waited several decades to share their stories. Many had felt such shame at the abuse they had endured, that they never told another living soul, not their families, not their friends - until the commission arrived in their corner of Canada. The commission would allow them to at least begin their healing journeys.
The inquiry was more of an endless marathon, an odyssey. The three commissioners travelled tens of thousands of miles to hundreds of communities, even the most remote on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, to hear story after story of abuse. By all accounts, the work of the commissioners was relentless, physically demanding and emotionally gruelling. With the evidence now gathered, Canada was about to face a moment of reckoning.
[For more of this story, written by Sian Griffiths, go to http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33099511]
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