The residential school case continues in Canada. Williams Lake First Nation in western British Columbia announced on Tuesday (January 25th) that their search had identified 93 “potential human burials” on the site of a former boarding school in the west of the country.
This preliminary research was carried out using geo-radar, explained this indigenous community in a press release.
They were carried out on a perimeter of about 14 hectares, among the 480 that make up the site of the former St. Joseph’s Mission boarding school, located about 300 kilometers north of Kamloops where the remains of 215 children had been found at the end of May. .
The institution welcomed thousands of children between 1886 and until its closure in 1981. It was managed “by various religious sects”, and mainly by Catholic missionaries by order of the Canadian government, explains the indigenous community which has about 800 members. “There is still a lot of work to be done at the St Joseph site and we intend to continue it”, assured its leader, Willie Sellars.
150,000 children cut off from their culture
“Today’s news from Williams Lake First Nation brings up many painful emotions”said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “My heart breaks for the members of the community and for those whose loved ones never came home”, he added, in a tweet.
Today’s news from Williams Lake First Nation brings a lot of distressing emotions to the surface. My heart breaks f… https://t.co/cgFV1w24La
In early January, Ottawa announced funding of 1.9 million Canadian dollars (1.3 million euros) to help the Williams Lake First Nation’s investigation into this former residential school.
“To date, $116.8 million has been committed to help First Nations, Inuit and Métis survivors, their families and communities locate and commemorate missing children who attended residential schools”, said the Canadian government in a press release.
In total, more than a thousand anonymous graves have been found since May on the sites of former boarding schools. And numerous searches are underway across the country – between 4,000 and 6,000 students are said to have disappeared, according to the authorities.
Between the end of the XIXand century and the 1990s, some 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly recruited into more than 130 residential schools across the country where they were cut off from their families, language and culture. A national commission of inquiry had described this system as “cultural genocide”.