Canada ? Prime Minister Stephen Harper will deliver a public apology for a decades-long government policy requiring Canadian Indians to attend state-funded church schools – often scenes of physical and sexual abuse.

Harper will make the apology in Parliament on June 11 to Canada’s First Nations, a collection of Indian groups that have been seeking such an acknowledgment for years.

From the 19th century until the 1970s, tens of thousands of aboriginal children were required to attend church-run schools in a painful attempt to rid them of their native cultures and languages and integrate them into Canadian society.

The federal government admitted 10 years ago that physical and sexual abuse in the once-mandatory schools was rampant.

That legacy of abuse and isolation has been cited by Indian leaders as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reservations.