Long Inuit wait for residential-school apology from prime minister ends Friday
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. — Jimmy Tuttauk was working on the remote coast of northern Labrador when he first heard that Ottawa was settling with former students of residential schools.
It was 2007 and he was listening to a radio news report that sent his heart soaring — until he realized the awful truth.
“My God, how could they have left us out?” Tuttauk recalled thinking as it became clear Aboriginal children who suffered in similar dorms and classrooms in Labrador and northern Newfoundland were excluded.
“It was never about the compensation,” he said of the decade-long legal odyssey that followed. That traumatic journey, fraught with nightmares of abuse that never fully fade, culminates Friday with what Tuttauk and so many others have longed for: an official apology.