751 unmarked graves found at Canada’s indigenous school

On Thursday, leaders of a First Nation Indigenous Group in Canada, promulgated that they had found attestations of no less than 751 unmarked graves that are close to a former residential school in a Canadian province known as Saskatchewan.

Less than a month ago, specialists came across 215 unmarked graves of indigenous children on the sites of another former boarding school located in British Columbia. After the 215 graves were found, there were several uproars and protests across Canada, leading up to the toppling of an effigy of Egerton Ryerson, who was one of the main/key figures behind the residential school system of Canada.

The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has mentioned that he was “terribly saddened” by the unearthing of these graves and mentioned that the finding was a deplorable reminder of the discrimination, racism, and injustice indigenous people faced and continue to face in the country.

These graves simply add to the superfluity of dossiers that show the atrocities that are committed against indigenous children by the boarding school systems, and the apathetic way with which the Government is treating the matter of their deaths.

In 1883, Prime Minister (of Canada at the time) John Macdonald set up a residential and day school method for indigenous children. This system was designed with the idea of helping indigenous people catch up with the stipulations of Western Society. Unfortunately, these schools were underfunded, making them rely on donations from local churches. Due to this fact, the educators used the children to generate higher incomes. The children were forced/made to produce clothing, raise animals, grow vegetables, etc. Such schools banned the use of cultural practices as well as the use of native languages, and to make their methods stick, they would often do so through violence. Most of the children who were placed in these schools were taken away from their families - by force if necessary - and subjected to emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Many children died due to unsanitary and/or noxious living conditions, disease, and so-called ‘accidents’.

Due to such reasons and more, this system was disbanded in 1996, and in 2008, the Canadian Government proclaimed a formal apology for the horrors that the indigenous children went through in the school.

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, more commonly known as the TRC, is a component of a residential school agreement. Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC interviewed more than 6,000 witnesses to report the history of all these schools. They were able to identify more than 4,100 students who expired in/at the schools, and over 150,000 students who were attending the schools at some point. These findings were published in 2015, and since then a federal project has been going on to document the providence of the children who never returned to their families, more commonly known as the “missing children.”

Though this is a tragedy, it has not yet been made clear whether all these graves are related to the school.

A while ago, the Cowessess started to use ground-penetrating radar to locate the unmarked graves. The announcement on Thursday was simply the first phase of their search endeavours.