Nearly 200 unnamed graves found near former boarding school in Canada
An indigenous people in Canada announced that they found the remains of 182 people next to an old boarding school in the province of British Columbia.
An indigenous group called the Lower Kootenay Band said it was premature to say whether the remains belonged to former students of the school.
But the invention added new ones to such unnamed burials detected across the country.
The nameless graves have sparked nationwide outrage, with some calling for the July 1st Canada Day holiday to be cancelled.
Indigenous leaders said they expect to find more graves as research continues.
“You can never be fully prepared for something like this,” said Jason Louie, chief of the Lower Kootenay group, a member of the Ktunaxa people.
The dörtaq’am, one of the four groups that make up the Ktunaxa people, are located in St. He detected the tombs around the Eugene Missionary School with technology that can see underground.
The Lower Kootenay Band said in a statement that some of the remains were found in shallow burials only a meter deep.
st. Eugene was ruled by the Catholic Church from 1912 until the early 1970s. It was one of more than 130 compulsory boarding schools, funded by the Canadian government and run by religious groups, aimed at forcibly assimilating indigenous youth in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Lower Kooteny Band stated that as many as 100 members of the band were forced to go to school.
However, the remains were found in the evening cemetery, which dates back to 1865. The wooden crosses that were placed to mark the graves also disappeared over time.
“This element, among others, makes it very difficult to determine whether these unnamed graves belong to children attending St. Eugene Boarding School,” the group’s statement said.
‘Some of the bodies belong to children aged 3’
The mass graves found last month at the Kamloops Indigenous Boarding School, which was closed in 1978 in the province of British Columbia, brought back the boarding schools that aimed to assimilate indigenous children in the 1800s and 1900s in the country.
Kamloops Boarding School was the largest of such schools.
Opened by Catholic authorities in 1890, the school had at least 500 students in the 1950s. The school came under central government control in 1969 and provided dormitory services to district students until it closed in 1978.
Rosanne Casimir, the leader of the local group Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, said: “There is no record of the children who died. Some bodies belong to children aged 3 years.”
More than 150,000 children were forcibly put into schools
Between 1863 and 1998 in Canada, the number of children who were forcibly taken from their families and homes and placed in these dormitories was more than 150,000.
It was forbidden for these children to speak their mother tongue or to keep their culture alive. A significant portion of them were subjected to abuse and torture.
An authoritative commission’s report published in 2008 stated that many children never returned home from these schools.
The Canadian government officially apologized for the system that assimilated the natives upon this report.
