Canada in shock after 751 graves found near residential school

Published on : 06/24/2021 – 19:57

A macabre new discovery forces Canada to dive into one of the darkest parts of its history. An indigenous community announced, Thursday, June 24, the discovery of more than 750 anonymous graves on the site of a boarding school for indigenous children in the west of the country. This discovery, which comes a month after the remains of 215 schoolchildren were identified near another indigenous settlement run by the Catholic Church, illustrates the ordeal experienced by thousands of indigenous children.

“We have spotted 751 unmarked graves,” at the site of a former residential school housing native children in Marieval, Saskatchewan, in western Canada, Cowessess Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme said Thursday.

“This is not a mass grave, these are unidentified graves,” he added. The victims are mainly children, he said. The exact number of graves is to be confirmed in the coming weeks, due to a margin of error from the geo-radars used, he added.

Some graves were undoubtedly surmounted by stelae identifying the victims, but some of them were removed “by representatives of the Catholic Church”, a criminal act in Canada, according to him.

Trauma

These discoveries rekindle the trauma experienced by some 150,000 Amerindian, Métis and Inuit children, cut off from their families, their language and their culture and forcibly enrolled until the 1990s in 139 of these residential schools across the country.

Many of them have been subjected to ill-treatment or sexual abuse, and more than 4,000 have died there, according to a commission of inquiry which found a veritable “cultural genocide” on the part of Canada .

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said his “pain” Thursday in a statement, said Canada should “learn from (its) past and move forward on the common path of reconciliation”.

It is a “crime against humanity”, denounced Thursday the head of the Federation of Sovereign Native Nations of the province of Saskatchewan, Bobby Cameron. “The only crime we ever committed was being born indigenous,” he said.

“We will find more bodies and we will not stop until we find all the children,” the official promised.

Excavations around this former school in Marieval began at the end of May after the discovery of the remains of 215 schoolchildren buried on the site of another former boarding school, that of Kamloops, in British Columbia, the westernmost province of the country. .

“Tragic but not surprising”

This discovery had caused a shock wave in Canada and reopened the debate on these hated institutions where indigenous children were forcibly sent to be assimilated into the mainstream culture.

She also revived calls for the Pope and the Church to apologize for the abuse and violence suffered by the students of these residential schools. The sovereign pontiff refused to make such an apology, however, provoking the anger and frustration of indigenous Canadian communities.

For their part, UN human rights experts have urged Ottawa and the Vatican to conduct a swift and full investigation. “It’s absolutely tragic but not surprising”, reacted on Wednesday evening Perry Bellegarde, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, which represents more than 900,000 indigenous people in Canada, on his Twitter account.

The Marieval Residential School in eastern Saskatchewan hosted Aboriginal children between 1899 and the mid-1990s, before being demolished and replaced with a day school.

Asked on the CBC channel, a former resident of the Marieval school, Barry Kennedy, estimated that this new discovery was only the tip of the iceberg. “I imagine that, you know, from the stories that have been told by our friends and classmates, there are several places (where graves would be) per school,” he explained.

In the wake of the discovery of the remains of children at Kamloops Residential School, excavations were undertaken around several of these former schools across Canada, with the assistance of government authorities.

With AFP