160 more graves discovered near boarding school for Indigenous children in Canada

In Canada, dozens of anonymous graves have again been found on the site of a former boarding school for Aboriginal children. Joan Brown, chief of the Penelcut tribe, said more than 160 graves had been discovered on the former school grounds on Kuper Island. Aboriginal children were educated from the end of the 19th century until 1975, at boarding schools on the island, west of Vancouver.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday after learning of the discovery, “It broke my heart.” “We cannot bring back those who have died, but we can bring the truth to light and will continue to work with indigenous communities to fight discrimination and structural racism.”

In the past few weeks, more than a thousand anonymous mass graves of Indigenous children have been discovered near four different boarding schools in Canada. The discovery caused panic across the country.

In Canada, since 1874, 150,000 native and mixed couple children were separated from their families and cultures and placed in church homes in an effort to force them to conform to white-majority society. Many of them were abused or sexually abused in homes. According to previous information, at least 4,000 of these children died, many of them from tuberculosis. The last of these schools did not close until the 1990s.

AFP