More horror in Canada. The remains of hundreds of native children were found buried near a former Catholic school, the ‘Marieval Indian Residential School’ in Saskatchewan. The indigenous communities of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations made it known in a statement without specifying the number of bodies found, but making it clear that it is higher than that of the remains of 215 children discovered last month near the Kamloops Indian Residential School, in British Columbia. The institutes were part of a network of schools, active until the late 1970s, founded by the Canadian government and administered by Catholic Churches that removed indigenous children from their culture to assimilate them to their own.
As in Kamloops, also in Marieval – where the school operated from 1899 to 1997 – radars were used to check the area where the mass grave was found. The head of the Cowessess community, Cadmus Delorme, and the head of the Federation, Bobby Cameron, will hold a press conference today to give more information on the find that the leader of the Canadian indigenous community describes as tragic. “I ask all Canadians to stand by the First Nations in this extremely difficult time,” Perry Bellegarde, head of the First Nations assembly, wrote on Twitter.
There were over 150 thousand native children who between the 19th century and the end of the seventies were forced to enter these residential schools, where they were converted: the children were not allowed to speak their own language, they were often mistreated and beaten. According to some estimates, more than 6,000 children are believed to have died in these schools, the last of which closed in the mid-1990s. In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized to Parliament for this policy and for the physical and sexual abuse that was committed in these schools. A commission was also created that year, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which for years investigated to reconstruct the whole truth and eventually determined that many of the children never returned to their communities.