What Fernand de Varennes, our Special Rapporteur, has done and is doing with these four Forums/Fora represents this hope15. Thank you, Fernand. Thank you everybody here! 1 Thomas, Jacob (Chief), with Terry Boyle (2001) [1994]. Teachings from the Longhouse. Toronto: Stoddart. 2 The American Board of Indian Commissioners wrote in 1880: “…first teaching the children to read and write in their own language enables them to master English with more ease when they take up that study…a child beginning a four years’ course with the study of Dakota would be further advanced in English at the end of the term than one who had not been instructed in Dakota. … it is true that by beginning in the Indian tongue and then putting the students into English studies our missionaries say that after three or four years their English is better than it would have been if they had begun entirely with English” (quoted from Francis, Norbert & Reyhner, Jon (2002). Language and Literacy Teaching for Indigenous Education. A Bilingual Approach. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, pp. 45-46, 77, 98). In Canada,“for most of the school system’s life, though the truth was known to it”, the Department of Indian Affairs, “after nearly a century of contrary evidence in its own files”, still “maintained the fiction of care” and “contended that the schools were ‘operated for the welfare and education of Indian children’”(Milloy 1999: xiii-xiv). These schools represented “a system of persistent neglect and debilitating abuse”, “violent in its intention to ‘kill the Indian’ in the child for the sake of Christian civilization” (ibid.: xiv; xv). Finally closed down in 1986, the Department and the churches were “fully aware of the fact" that the schools “unfitted many children, abused or not, for life in either Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal communities. The schools produced thousands of individuals incapable of leading healthy lives or contributing positively to their communities” (ibid.: xvii) (From p. 66 in SkutnabbKangas, Tove & Dunbar, Robert (2010). Indigenous Children’s Education as Linguistic Genocide and a Crime Against Humanity? A Global View. Gáldu Čála. Journal of Indigenous Peoples' Rights No 1, 2010. Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino: Galdu, Resource Centre for the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Download at http://www.tove-skutnabbkangas.org/en/most_recent_books.html). See Milloy, John S. (1999). “A National Crime”: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986. Winnipeg, Manitoba: The University of Manitoba Press. 3 A government resolution (“Curzon resolution”) was formulated in 1904 expressing serious dissatisfaction with the organisation of education in India, and blaming Macaulay for the neglect of Indian languages (Evans 2002, 277). This extract shows its present-day relevance,