The news was announced last week by Rosanne Casimir, the chief of the Tk’emlups to Secwepemc tribe in the small town of Kamloops, in Canada’s mountainous western region. The remains were found with a special radar, which can image the bottom several meters deep. The youngest victim would have been 3 years old.
Casimir said the investigation will continue into June. It must then become clear whether the numbers are correct, and whether these are indeed unknown deaths.
It was already known that dozens of children have died in the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the past century. In front of the building, which functioned between 1890 and 1977 and housed some five hundred children at the top, there is a monument with 65 names of deceased students on it. But in addition there were dozens of ‘missing persons’, about whom the school management has always told the family that they had run away.
“It’s a harsh reality, but it’s our truth, our history,” Casimir said at a news conference. “And it’s something we’ve always had to fight to prove.”
The National Truth and Reconciliation Commission has so far documented 4,100 dead children in Canada’s boarding schools. However, there were always rumors of anonymous mass graves. One of them seems to have been found, in the field near a bend in the river, where the tribe has built a small park and a stadium for powwows, an annual spiritual dance.
The tribe has announced memorial services for the next three nights, with sacred fires and drumming. Many flowers have been laid at the monument in recent days.
Excuses
In 2008, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized on behalf of Canada for the boarding school system, where indigenous children were forced into the Western ranks with neglect, malnutrition and abuse (as happened in the US and Australia, for example). They were not allowed to speak their own language and had to forget their own religion and customs. The Reconciliation Commission spoke in a report in 2015 of ‘cultural genocide’.
The system, which began in 1883, was explicitly intended to solve the ‘Native American problem’. “If we want to do something about the Indian, we have to catch him very early,” the adviser wrote in a report to the government. Schools became compulsory from 1920. In total, an estimated 150 thousand indigenous children attended the schools. The last closed in 1997.
Since a court decision in 2007, a total of 3.2 billion Canadian dollars (about 2.2 billion euros) in compensation has been paid to 28 thousand former students – an average of about 80 thousand euros per person.
The Catholic Church, a partner in colonial Christianization for centuries, unlike other Christian accomplices, has never apologized for the practices. However, Archbishop Michael Miller of the Diocese of Vancouver said in a statement that “the pain this news causes reminds us that we must bring to light every tragic situation that has taken place at the Church-run boarding schools.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday the news has “broken his heart.” He called it “a reminder of that black and shameful chapter in our national history.”
Relatives now demand more actions and fewer words. The 2015 Reconciliation Commission report advocates structural funding for centers to alleviate the physical, mental and spiritual pain caused by the boarding schools.
–
