215 bodies of Indigenous children were found in a mass grave last weekend on the grounds of a British Columbia school set up as a residential school to assimilate Indigenous people.
Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation, according to The New York Times, announced on Friday that ground-penetrating radar had discovered the remains near the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
“It’s a harsh reality and it’s our truth, it’s our history,” Chief Casimir said. “And it’s something that we’ve always had to fight to prove. To me, it’s always been a horrible, horrible history.”
This revelation has, once again, highlighted the dark legacy that Canada has when it comes to its treatment of First Nations people. The Indian residential school system was set up by the government and administrated by Christian churches who were looking to “kill the Indian” by assimilation into European traditions and committing a cultural genocide of Indigenous traditions.
Residential schools forcibly removed children, by the hundreds of thousands, from their families and subjected many to physical and sexual abuse. The generational trauma of these events has been seen in communities today, but this trauma is not in the distant past. While the first residential school was set up in 1828, the last school didn’t close until 1996. Anyone older than 25 years old grew up with the horrible vestiges of this imperialism and cultural genocide still beating.
Unmarked Child Burial Site Found at Former Canadian Residential School, Indigenous Communities Call for Investigation
215 bodies of Indigenous children were found in a mass grave last weekend on the grounds of a British Columbia residential school.
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