‘This monster cannot be allowed to get away’: Residential school survivors demand justice
When Piita Irniq meets Pope Francis in Iqaluit on Friday, he’ll make a request he’s been waiting a lifetime to deliver. In August 1958, when he was 11 years old, Irniq was kidnapped from his family home in Naujaat (then called Repulse Bay) on the shores of Hudson Bay and forced to attend a residential school in Chesterfield Inlet.
Like so many other Indigenous students, he endured terrible abuse. Six decades later, he is planning to ask the Pope, in person, to send one of their alleged abusers, Father Johannes Rivoire, to Canada so he can finally face justice. “This monster cannot be allowed to get away with what he did to Inuit children,” Irniq said.
Rivoire, a French Oblate priest, began working in Nunavut back in the 1960s, before returning to France in 1993. A few years later, the RCMP issued a warrant for his arrest on multiple charges of sexual abuse.
But France refuses to extradite its citizens to face charges abroad and so Rivoire remains free. He’s now in his 90s and is reportedly living in a retirement home in Lyon.
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