As a young child, Dennis Saddleman’s mother always ensured he knew how much she loved him, gave him kisses on his forehead and told him how beautiful he was.
That all changed when he was six years old, and those warm words turned ice cold when he was sent to the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The priests and nuns who were tasked with looking after him constantly berated him, beat him, barred him from speaking his language and practising his culture, and sexually assaulted him.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into when I got there,” he said in an interview on Parliament Hill in front of the Survivors’ Flag, which is meant to honour and remember survivors of residential schools.
Story continues below advertisement
“I couldn’t understand why they were treating us like we were dogs. They punished us even though we were innocent.”
More than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to …