“Our hearts are heavy today. It’s unimaginable. Michael Starr, the leader of an Aboriginal community in western Canada, struggles to find the words. On Thursday, possible unmarked graves and a child’s bone were found near a former Canadian residential school for natives. For a year and a half, more than 1,300 children’s graves have been found near these institutions where indigenous children were forcibly enrolled, causing a shock wave in the country and a national awareness of the dark colonial past.
In Lebret, in the province of Saskatchewan, a radar has made it possible to discover nearly “2,000 suspicious areas” which must be the subject of an in-depth search, explained Thursday the Cree community of Star Blanket. A precise quantification of the number of graves is still impossible before further investigations because each “zone” is not necessarily synonymous with anonymous burial, said Sheldon Poitras, who conducted the research. However, a fragment of the jawbone of a child dating from around 125 years old was also discovered, the “material proof of the presence of an unmarked burial”, noted Sheldon Poitras.
A “cultural genocide”
It was on the advice of former students of the residential school that the search areas had been selected near this residential school administered by the Catholic Church and open until 1998. On Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the announcement ” difficult” and admitted that “the work has only just begun”, pledging government assistance at every step.
For the Minister of Indigenous Services, Marc Miller, “the discovery of the bones of a very young child on the site of the Lebret residential school is a tragic reminder of Canada’s painful history and the heinous acts that were committed in the boarding schools”.
Between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s, some 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly enrolled in 139 boarding schools across the country, where they were cut off from their family, language and culture. Thousands never came back. A national commission of inquiry in 2015 described this system as “cultural genocide”.