Canada: Graves found again on school grounds

More than 1000 graves of Indigenous children in care have already been discovered in Canada – now an Indigenous community has reported another discovery: 93 suspected graves were unearthed by radar at a former boarding school site.

Dozens of anonymous graves for Indigenous children have been rediscovered in Canada. Indigenous community Williams Lake First Nation said 93 suspicious graves were found using radar surveys at the site of a former boarding school in the west of the country.

The researchers studied an area of ​​14 hectares belonging to a former boarding school near Kamloops in western British Columbia. Thousands of children were housed at the facility from 1886 to 1981. It was run “by various religious denominations” and primarily by Catholic missionaries on behalf of the Canadian government, it said.

Trudeau: “A lot of painful feelings”

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said news of other possible graves “brought a lot of painful feelings back to the surface”. He wrote on Twitter, “The thought of members of the community and those whose loved ones never came home breaks her heart.”

In early January, the Canadian government promised funds equivalent to 1.3 million euros for an investigation into the former boarding school site. According to its own statements, the government has so far provided more than 80 million euros to search for and commemorate missing indigenous children.

abuse and abuse

For months, Canada has been rocked by a scandal surrounding its historical treatment of its Native peoples. Since May, more than a thousand anonymous mass graves of Indigenous children have been discovered near various boarding schools across the country. The discovery caused panic across the country.

From 1874, about 150,000 children in the country were separated from their families and their culture and placed in church homes to force them to adapt to white-majority society. Many of them were abused or sexually abused at home. At least 4,000 children died, many of whom were from tuberculosis. According to officials, between 4,000 and 6,000 children are still missing.

The last of these schools closed only in the 1990s. A National Commission of Inquiry described the treatment of Indigenous children as “cultural genocide”.