Canada opens racist past to public

AFTER decades of foot-dragging, Canada is about to take a look at what one aboriginal leader calls “the single most disgraceful, harmful and racist act in our history.”

From the 1870s to the 1970s, about 150,000 native Indian children were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to distant residential schools, where many say they were abused mentally, physically and sexually.

Conditions in the schools — run by churches on behalf of the government — were sometimes dire. Accounts suggest up to half the children in some institutions died of tuberculosis.