This is the third such discovery in a month in Canada. Excavations this time have uncovered 182 anonymous graves on the site of a former boarding school welcoming indigenous people, an indigenous community said on Wednesday.
The discovery, near the former St Eugene boarding school in Cranbrook, British Columbia, Canada’s most westerly province, announced in a press release by the Indigenous community of Lower Kootenay, follows the detection of 751 graves. last week in Marieval, Saskatchewan (west), and the remains of 215 schoolchildren in Kamloops, British Columbia in late May.
“Cultural genocide” on the part of Canada
The community of Lower Kootenay says they conducted the research in 2020 and located these graves using geo-radars, near this former boarding school managed between 1912 and the 1970s by the Catholic Church, on behalf of the Canadian state. . “Some of the remains were buried in graves about 3 to 4 feet deep,” 90 to 120 centimeters, said the Lower Kootenay Aboriginal community of the Ktunaxa First Nation.
“All Indigenous children between the ages of 7 and 15 were required by law to attend Indigenous residential schools where many of them received cruel and sometimes fatal treatment,” the statement said.
This new discovery revives the trauma experienced by some 150,000 Amerindian, Métis and Inuit children, cut off from their families, their language and their culture, and forcibly enlisted 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 had concluded to a real “cultural genocide” on the part of Canada.