Canada, more horror: human remains found near another former school

The horror continues in Canada of the discovery of human remains buried around residential schools, funded by the state and run by the Catholic Church, which for decades indigenous children have been forced to attend. The Lower Kootenay Band, a First Nations community in western Canada, announced that a radar search has identified the remains of 182 people near St Eugene’s Mission residential school, near the town of Cranbrook, British Columbia. “We believe these 182 souls were members of the Ktunaxa Nation Bands and other neighboring First Nations communities,” continues the statement that comes after Saskatchewan’s Cowessess First Nation announced last week that 751 burials have been discovered. And last month 215 were found around another building that housed one of these schools. Between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s, over 150,000 indigenous children were forced to attend these institutions. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission established by the Canadian government when it first apologized for this campaign in 2008 established, the goal was to assimilate them to the dominant culture by banning them from speaking their language and following their own traditions, also forcing Christian conversion. In these boarding schools, children have suffered mistreatment, terrible physical and sexual abuse, and thousands of children have died there.