The indigenous community in Canada announced on Tuesday that anonymous graves have been found again at former boarding schools. It concerns a total of 54 anonymous graves at two different locations. Last year, the discovery of hundreds of graves at former boarding schools sent a shockwave through the country.
A total of 42 graves were found near the former boarding school at Fort Pelly. The remaining 12 were found near St. Philip’s, research chief Ted Quewezance said when announcing the find.
“Canadians cannot believe that a human being could have treated other people, especially children, the way we have been treated,” he said at a news conference in Saskatchewan province.
The boarding schools in question, both run by the Catholic Church, were open from 1928 to 1969 and from 1905 to 1913 respectively.
Lee Kitchemonia, the community leader, said it was “an ordeal to discover that there are anonymous graves where we drive and walk every day.” Kitchemonia wants archival research to be done so that it may be possible to find out who is buried there.
Between the late 1800s and the 1990s, about 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly enrolled in 139 boarding schools across the country, where they were cut off from their families, language and culture. A national commission of inquiry in 2015 described the system as “cultural genocide.”
Since an Indigenous community in Kamloops, western British Columbia, discovered hundreds of graves on the site of a former boarding school last May, other Indigenous communities across Canada have embarked on similar quests.
More than 1,300 children’s graves have been found so far and authorities estimate that a total of between 4,000 and 6,000 students have disappeared.
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