The remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found at the site of a former residential school for indigenous children, a discovery Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described as heartbreaking on Friday.
The children were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978, according to the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Nation, which said the remains were found with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist.
"We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify," Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir said in a statement. "At this time, we have more questions than answers."
Canada's residential school system, which forcibly separated indigenous children from their families, constituted "cultural genocide," a six-year investigation into the now-defunct system found in 2015.
The report documented horrific physical abuse, rape, malnutrition and other atrocities suffered by many of the 150,000 children who attended the schools, typically run by Christian churches on behalf of Ottawa from the 1840s to the 1990s.
It found more than 4,100 children died while attending residential school. The deaths of the 215 children buried in the grounds of what was once Canada's largest residential school are believed to not have been included in that figure and appear to have been undocumented until the discovery. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/ ... 021-05-28/
Well this was news, and it is certainly gruesome as hell. Based on gross calculation, the death rate of the schools (if you can call it so) is 2.7%, which is more than the COVID lethality rate in the US. And I guess you can say that the event happened quite recently, i.e. in contemporary history. Some of the "survivors" of the school are still alive.
For decades, McLeod says he and former students like him would wonder what had happened to friends and classmates.
"Sometimes people didn't come back, we were happy for them, we thought they ran away, not knowing if they did or whatever happened to them," said McLeod, who now serves as chief of British Columbia's Upper Nicola band.
"There were discussions that this may have happened, that they may have passed," he says adding, "What I realized yesterday was how strong I was, as a little boy, how strong I was to be here today, because I know that a lot of people didn't go home."
McLeod says the residential school system scarred generations in his family and the abuse he suffered at the school in Kamloops terrorized him, his family and his classmates.
"The abuse that happened to me was physical, yes, was sexual, yes, and in 1966 I was a person that didn't want to live anymore, it changed me," said McLeod, comparing the trauma he suffered to that of a prisoner of war.
He says he entered the school in 1966 along with most of his siblings.
"Seven of us went at the same time, same school that my mum and my dad went to, there wasn't an option, it was a requirement, it was the law. And I can only imagine what my mom and my dad, how they felt, when they dropped some of us there knowing what they experienced at that school," he said. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/05/28/worl ... index.html
I'm not too informed on the Canadian residential schooling system to have a concrete opinion, but I certainly didn't expect cases like this to emerge from places such as Canada, since this looks more like events that usually happen in the late 19th century.
UPDATEs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_ ... gravesites