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“I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.” ~~ John G. Diefenbaker

The untold story of Canada’s only province-wide police investigation into residential school abuses (IJF)


When RCMP Const. Calvin Swustus got the call to travel to BC’s Lower Mainland for a week of training in 1995, he knew was being asked to join some sort of specialized task force, but that’s about it.

“When I arrived, I looked around and realized that all the First Nations police members were there,” Swustus recalled in a recent interview with the IJF. “After the first day we realized that, ‘Oh we're going to be taking on investigating residential school crimes against our people.’”

The mission hit close to home for Swustus, a member of the Cowichan Tribes who was then 17 years into his career with Vancouver Island RCMP. As a teenager, he’d lost friends to suicide stemming from the trauma they’d experienced at the Kuper Island Indian Residential School.

Now, he was being inducted into the RCMP Native Indian Residential School Task Force, a team assembled with the ambitious goal of investigating every single allegation of sexual assault and violence at 15 residential schools in BC  ...

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