Canada, new grave with Native American child remains discovered

The remains of hundreds of Native American children were found near another former Catholic school in Canada, the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan. The indigenous communities of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations made it known in a statement without specifying the number of bodies found, but making it clear that it is higher than that of the remains of 215 children found last month near the Kamloops Indian Residential School, in British Columbia. The institutes were part of a network of schools, active until the late 1970s, founded by the Canadian government and administered by Catholic Churches that removed indigenous children from their culture to assimilate them to their own. As in Kamloops, also in Marieval – where the school operated from 1899 to 1997 – radars were used to check the area where the mass grave was found. The head of the Cowessess community, Cadmus Delorme, and the head of the Federation, Bobby Cameron, will hold a press conference today to give more information on the find that the leader of the Canadian indigenous community describes as tragic. “I ask all Canadians to stand by the First Nations in this extremely difficult time,” wrote Perry Bellegarde, head of the First Nations assembly, on Twitter.