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Representatives of the Penelacut tribe found these graves on the site of the former Cooper Island Industrial School. The school was once part of a network of state-owned Native Canadian boarding schools where children were separated from their families and sentenced for forced cultural assimilation and violence. Members of the Penelacut tribe reported on these graves in a newsletter they shared online with neighboring tribes on July 8, writes livescience.com.
This horrible find is the latest discovery of its kind in recent months. To date, more than 1,000 people have been identified in former Native Canadian boarding schools. nameless graves and remains of children. In addition to the graves on Penelacut Island, First Nations communities found unmarked children’s graves in three other areas between May and July, via ground-scanning radars, in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
On May 28, members of the Tkemlups te Secwepemc nation reported finding the remains of 215 children buried in a former Kamlups Indian school run by the Catholic Church in British Columbia between 1890 and 1978, Reuters reported. Just weeks later, on June 24, the First Combatant Nation reported the radar detection of up to 751 unmarked graves at the Marival Indian School in Saskatchewan. From 1899 to 1997, the school also belonged to the Catholic Church, reported BBC News.
Children of Indigenous Canadians in school. Photo from the US Library of Congress.
Then, on June 30, representatives of the Lower Anthony group, which belonged to the Ktunak people, indicated that a recent investigation into the former St. Eugenia Mission School, another institution of the Catholic Church that operated between 1890 and 1970, found 182 graves shallow and unmarked with the remains of children, CNN reported on July 2.
Some of the children who died in Kamlupse were only 3 years old, NPR said. Former students from dozens of these schools reported constant violence and neglect. Student deaths have turned into the thousands over the decades, according to a 2015 government report by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Dead children were often buried next to schools to prevent the government from incurring additional costs to transport the children’s remains to their families.
For almost 150 years, from 1863 to 1998, more than 130 schools such as Kamlups, Marivally or Cooper Island were funded by the Canadian government, and in 1969 many belonged to Christian churches. These schools have forcibly separated indigenous children from their parents and isolated them from their communities and culture, writes the Indigenous Foundations, a website dedicated to the first nation studies program at the University of British Columbia.
In Canada, more than 1,000 children found support near the old schools.
During that period, more than 150 thousand people studied in these schools. Canadian Indigenous Children: From First Nations, Methis (indigenous peoples in some parts of Canada, descendants of indigenous and European ancestors) and Inuit communities, wrote Indian Country Today. Until 1951, all indigenous children between the ages of 7 and 15 were required to attend these schools. However, the violence continued for as long as these schools were in operation, and the children “were treated cruelly and sometimes even fatally,” wrote representatives of the Lower Anthony group in a June 30 report.
“Terrible violence”
In these boarding schools, children of all ages had to follow strict rules that restricted the use of their mother tongue and prohibited the practice of their traditions and customs. Violation of these rules meant severe punishments that, according to former students, turned into “appalling violence by school personnel: physical, sexual, emotional and psychological,” the Indigenous Foundations wrote.
In Canada, more than 1,000 children found support near the old schools.
According to the site, George Guerin, a former leader of the Muscovite nation who attended the Cooper School in British Columbia, recalls that one of the keepers, Sister Marie Baptiste, “had sticks that were similar in length and thickness to sticks of billiards. When he heard that I was speaking in my own language, he woke up and greeted me with this stick. From 2007 to 2015, the alumni of these schools presented almost 38 thousand. reports of injuries caused by physical and sexual violence in these schools, notes the CBC.
The violence and neglect that prevailed in these boarding schools for thousands of children was fatal. A 2015 report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission states that there are documented deaths of 3,200 children in these schools, but the actual number could be 10 times higher, CBC reported. Four years later, the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation has published the names of 2,800 children who have been identified. The families of many of these children have never been notified of their deaths, the 2019 BBC News reported.
Since the late 1800s, these boarding schools for Native American children have been established in the United States, notes the Library of Congress. Children in these schools were also separated from their families and traditions and sentenced to strict rules and often brutal behavior.
“Although we do not know how many children were fostered, in 1900, 20,000 Indians were in boarding schools. By 1925, the number had more than tripled,” said the National Coalition of Healing of Boarding Schools for American Indians (NABS), a nonprofit organization. Foundation founded in 2012 to educate the public about 1,869 years of boarding school policy in the US “The tagline for this policy was’ Kill the Indian. Save the Man,” notes NABS. In the late 1970s, this Politics had separated hundreds of thousands of children from their families. Many have never returned from these boarding schools, and “the US government has yet to find out their fate,” the organization said.
In Canada, more than 1,000 children found support near the old schools.
US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland recently announced the Federal Indian Boarding Initiative, which will be tasked with reviewing the “painful legacy of federal boarding school policy,” according to a June 22 report released by the Department of the United States interior.
Representatives of the first nation, Tkemlups te Secwepemc, are due to publish a detailed report on the graves found in Kamlups by July 15, Global News Canada reported. The Canadian government, for its part, has promised $ 27 million to indigenous communities. dollars to identify all the graves.
“It was a crime against humanity, an attack on First Nations,” said Bobby Cameron, director of the Saskatchewan Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Peoples, after the children’s graves were discovered in Marivale.
“We won’t stop until we find all the remains,” he promised.
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