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At least 751 pits were found in the former boarding school for Indigenous children in Canada, officials said Thursday.
The savage discovery took place at the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, which opened in 1899 and closed in 1997 as a Catholic school.
“This was a crime against humanity, an attack on the first nations … The only crime we ever committed as children was the birth of an indigenous person,” said Bobby Cameron, head of the first federation of independent nations.
A month before Thursday’s announcement, a mass grave containing the bodies of 215 indigenous children was found another school like that, is the defunct Kamloops Indian Residential School in Ottawan.
Both institutions were part of the darkest chapter in Canadian history, where Indigenous children lived excluded from their families and send them to schools run by government and churches to force them to remove and assimilate culture. There were physical and sexual abuses in the schools thousands of children were killed, but the exact numbers and causes of death will never be fully known.
Cameron said they will investigate many more of these schools, and hope to find many more pits. “We’ll find more bodies, and we won’t stop until we find all of our children,” she said.
“Canada has found the findings of the genocide,” Cameron said. “We had concentration camps here … They were called residential schools in India. Canada will be known as a nation that tried to eradicate First Nations, and now we have evidence.”
The head of Cadmus Delorme Cowessess First Nation said the graves were once marked, but it is believed the Roman Catholic Church that ran the school removed the tombstones in the 1960s. Delorm has asked the pope to apologize for the role of the church that runs the residential school.
“The pope must apologize for what happened,” Delorm said. “Forgiveness is a stage for many on the healing journey.”
Earlier this month, the prime minister Justin Trudeau He also asked Pope Francis to apologize for the church’s responsibility in the deaths of indigenous children. “As a Catholic, I am very disappointed with the attitude that the Catholic Church has taken now and in recent years,” Trudeau said.
The days after Trudeau’s comments, the pontiff expressed sadness For the discovery of the Ottawa mass grave, however, he did not apologize. “I join the bishops of Canada and the entire Catholic Church in Canada in expressing my closeness to Canadians traumatized by the shocking news,” Francis said in a public statement.
On Thursday, Trudeau said it was “terribly saddened” that the bodies of even more indigenous children were found.
“Children should never be deprived of their families and communities, and their language, culture and identity should be stolen. A child should not have endured his precious loneliness and horrible abuse, “Trudeau said.” Children should not have to spend their last moments in a place where they lived in fear, not to see their loved ones again. And families should not be deprived of laughter and joy in children’s play, and the pride of seeing them grow in their community. “
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