“A dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history”: this is how Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau commented, on Twitter, the news of the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a mass grave near the Kamloops Indian Residential School (in the pic above, in 1970) in British Columbia: a institute opened in the late 1800s and closed in 1978, which was part of the network of schools founded by the government and mainly administered by Catholic churches (in the case of Kamloops, the management came under the control of the government in the second half of the 1960s), at the aim to “separate” the children of the indigenous people from their culture to “assimilate” them into the dominant culture.

An “unthinkable loss that had been talked about but which had never been documented” said the head of the community Tk’emlúps te Secwe’pemc, Rosanne Casimir: “Last weekend, with the help of a georadar, the terrible truth of the preliminary results came to light, with the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were just students of Kamloops Indian Residential School. Some were three years old, many were even undocumented”.

Casimir added that the remains found belong to children whose deaths “have never been documented”. Investigations will continue in collaboration with the British Columbia coroner’s office and the government has ensured that the remains will be rescued and identified.

According to a 2015 report, published by Canada’s Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, many of the children who attended these schools did not even receive adequate medical treatment, some died of tuberculosis, just as many also suffered physical and sexual abuse. And many paid with their lives their only “guilt” of belonging to another culture.

The Commission itself estimates that over a period of several decades about 6,000 children have lost their lives in these schools (130 in total, scattered throughout Canada) which, overall, from the end of the 1800s until the closing of the last one, in the 1996, they tried to “re-educate” about 150,000 children taken from indigenous families of the First Nations, Inuit and Métis.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in calling it a “dark and shameful chapter in our country’s history” (see the tweet below), invited all those involved in the affair to contact the National Indian Residential School Crisis Line. “It is there – he said – to provide 24/7 support to former residential school students and those affected and can be reached by calling 1-866-925-4419.”

Photo taken from “Library and Archives – Canada”: https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/