Red clothes hanging from a roadside commemorating dead children of indigenous peoples in Canada: The discovery of a mass grave of 215 children in the city of Kamloops in the summer of 2021 won the global “World Press Photo” contest. It comes from Canadian Amber Bracken, as the jury announced Thursday in Amsterdam. There were 65,000 images from over 4,000 photographers from 130 countries to choose from. Constantino Tsakalidis took the best single from Europe for Bloomberg News. It shows the huge wildfires in the Greek island of Evia in the summer of 2021.

“A Picture to Remember”

The winning photo of Canada, published in The New York Times, shows a cross under a dark sky with storm clouds and a rainbow. “It’s a picture that burns in your memory,” said jury president Rena Efendi. “I could almost hear the stillness in this picture, a silent moment of global reckoning with the history of colonialism not only in Canada but around the world.” The discovery of the mass grave shocked Canada deeply. For decades, Indigenous children were forcibly sent to boarding schools for re-education.