Remains of 215 children found at closed school in Canada

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– This is a painful reminder of the dark and shameful chapter in our country’s history, tweets Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday.

A georadar was used to find the remains of the buried children, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc tribe said in a statement the night before. They are believed to be from students who went to school in Kamloops in British Columbia in the southwest of the country.

– Some of them were only three years old, says the tribe’s leader Rosanne Casimir.

She calls it an “unthinkable loss that has been talked about, but never documented” by the management of the school, which closed about 50 years ago.

The findings are preliminary, and a report is expected to be published next month, Casimir informs the broadcaster CBC.

139 boarding schools

In the meantime, the indigenous people cooperate with forensic medicine and museums. The hope is to find more information about the gruesome discovery and records of the deaths.

The boarding school in Kamloops housed up to 500 students and was the largest of 139 boarding schools established at the end of the 19th century. The Catholic Church ran the school on behalf of the Canadian government from 1890 to 1969.

The federal government then took over the operation, before it was completely shut down in 1978.

Abused and assimilated

In all, about 150,000 young indigenous peoples from the First Nations (formerly called Indians), as well as Inuit and Métis, were forced to attend such schools. There, students were physically and sexually abused by principals and teachers who deprived them of their culture and language.

These experiences are used today as an explanation for the high level of poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence, as well as the high suicide rate, among indigenous peoples in Canada.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission has previously identified the names or information of at least 3,200 children who died as a result of abuse or neglect while attending such a boarding school. The exact number of deaths is still unknown.

Official apology

In 2008, the Government of Canada officially apologized for what the Commission has since called a “cultural genocide”.

The local boarding school students’ local communities around Canada will be contacted in the further investigations of the discovery at Kamloops.

– My heart breaks for the families and local communities affected by this tragic news, says Carolyn Bennett, who is the minister responsible for relations with the indigenous people.

She says the government will offer support in the process of processing the case.

At Kamloops School, the leadership had warned in 1910 that the federal funds were not sufficient to feed the students, according to the statement from Tk’emlups te Secwepemc.