After a six-day 'penitential pilgrimage' trip to Canada, Pope Francis on Saturday told a reporter on his plane heading back to Rome that the treatment of First Nations in Canada amounted to genocide.

During the trip, the Pope apologized to survivors of residential schools and all those who suffered the abuse of the Catholic Church. The pontiff said that he "didn't say the word (in Canada) because it didn't come to my mind, but I did describe the genocide. And I asked for forgiveness for this process which was genocide. I condemned it too."

"Taking away children, changing the culture, changing the mentality, changing the traditions, changing a race, let's put it that way, a whole culture. Yes, genocide is (a) technical word... But I have described what is, indeed, a genocide," the pontiff added.

From the late 1800s to the 1990s, approximately 150,000 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit children were enrolled in 139 residential schools across Canada as part of a government policy of forced assimilation. The last residential school was closed in 1996, which is merely 25 years ago.

Individuals forced into residential schools were snatched away from their families, language, and culture for months or years, and many were physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers.

They were not allowed to speak their native tongue or dress the native way. Their hair, an important element for Canadian Indigenous peoples, was cut because the clergy was aware of that significance. Residential schools were a space for forced assimilation and a tool of ethnic cleansing, all of which the Pope summarized by admitting that the treatment of indigenous people in residential schools was, in fact, an act of genocide. 

Earlier on his trip and during a papal Mass in Quebec, a large banner protesting the so-called "doctrine of discovery" was unfurled near the front row facing the congregation. The majority of those in the church were indigenous.

It is worth noting that the Doctrine of Discovery is a colonial-era doctrine that claims white European nations "discovered" North America during the age of exploration.

In Alberta, the Pope failed to call what happened a genocide or ethnic cleansing, rather apologizing in front of a crowd of indigenous peoples for the "evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples" of Canada, and regretted the Church's involvement in "cultural destruction," as he put it.

On July 26, President Fawn Sharp of the National Congress of American Indians wrote to Pope Francis, requesting the Catholic Church to work with Native American tribes to get all archives about federal Indian boarding schools in the United States.

"I invite His Holiness and the Catholic Church to work with the National Congress of American Indians to open all records related to Federal Indian boarding schools so that someday soon American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian peoples may host an apostolic - and maybe even apologetic - journey to our tribal lands here in the United States," Sharp said in the letter on Monday.

Sharp stated that the Pope's visit to Canada has motivated him to deliver an apology on behalf of the Catholic Church for its role in the cultural genocide perpetrated by Canada's residential school system.

Read more: Native Americans testify to US boarding school sexual, physical abuses