Ottawa, churches withholding documents, residential schools commission says

Jan O?Driscoll, a spokesman for Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan, said the government will carefully review the interim report, but refused to answer any questions on restricting access to records or costs.

The chairman of Canada?s truth and reconciliation commission says removing more than 100,000 aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in residential schools was an act of genocide.

Justice Murray Sinclair says the United Nations defines genocide to include the removal of children based on race, then placing them with another race to indoctrinate them. He says Canada has been careful to ensure its residential school policy was not ?caught up? in the UN?s definition.

Schools across Canada should add education about native residential schools to curricula to combat widespread ignorance hampering solutions to problems besetting First Nations, the commission charged with healing the damage from the schools said Friday.

"We have all been the losers for lack of that knowledge and understanding," said Marie Wilson of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

"It has led us to a place of stereotypes and judgment, and often an inability to connect the dots between the realities in our country today and the 130-year history of contributing factors that led to it."

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