Every August when he was a young boy, the Reverend Andrew Wesley would follow his family - members of the Cree First Nation - into the wilderness to live and hunt along a trapline. When Andrew was six, his father told him he was not coming with them; he would go to school. 'I didn't even know what that meant,' Mr Wesley, now 62, recalls.
Mr Wesley is an aboriginal priest and survivor of Canada's residential schools - church-run, government-funded institutions opened in the 1870s to 'civilise' native children as part of Canada's 'aggressive assimilation' policy. As the deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs in 1920 put it, the goal was 'to kill the Indian in the child'.
From 1870 to 1996, more than 150,000 native children were taken from their families and placed in the schools. Attendance was mandatory, with agents employed by the government to ensure all aboriginal children attended.
Once there, students were forced to forget all aspects of their culture - language, customs and even ways of thinking. Often, they did not receive adequate clothing, food, or shelter. Many experienced physical and sexual abuse.
The result was a generation stripped of their identity and disconnected from their communities.
'Not knowing who they were' and dealing with emotional and physical trauma, many survivors were left unable to raise their own children adequately.