Canada: 93 potential unmarked graves found in residential school
Indigenous leaders in British Columbia, Canada, believe that they've found 93 unmarked graves beside St. Joseph's Mission School.
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St. Joseph's Mission School, British Columbia, Canada.
Indigenous leaders in British Columbia, Canada, believe that they've found 93 unmarked graves beside a former boarding school on Tuesday.
This isn't the first time a shocking discovery of this sort is made, and probably won't be the last.
Since May 2021, hundreds of mass graves, unmarked and nameless, were found near boarding schools in Canada, situated at a dark time where systemic racism and violence in the North American country abused and buried children with no names.
Calls for the Canadian government to release records regarding the forced assimilation of indigenous children into White society have been renewed. Systemic violence in that respect, which occurred mainly at boarding schools, affected 150,000 indigenous children between 1883 to 1996.
Many of the schools were run by the Catholic Church, and the children were known to be forbidden from practicing their culture as well as speaking their native language.
In 2008, the Canadian government apologized for the widespread sexual and physical abuse that the children had endured, while indigenous groups as well as Canadian PM Justin Trudeau called on the Pope himself to apologize for the doing.
Read more: Pope Francis to Visit Canada Amid Calls for Apology to the Indigenous
Williams Lake First Nation Chief, Willie Sellars, explained at a news conference on Tuesday that the "potential human burials" were discovered with geophysical techniques, including ground-penetrating radars. The burials are located at the site of a former boarding school - St. Joseph's Mission school, which was in effect between 1886 and 1981. The school was mostly run by Roman Catholic missionaries.
The site would require excavation to confirm the findings, Sellars said. "For decades there were reports of neglect and abuse at the St. Joseph's Mission, and worse, there were reports of children dying or disappearing from the facility."
"For the bulk of St. Joseph's Mission’s history, these reports were at best given no credence. ... There can be no reconciliation before there is truth," he said.
