3+1 about Canada’s Residential Schools

More Indigenous children’s remains found in Canada

The remains of as many as 751 people, mainly Indigenous children, were discovered at the site of a former school for Indigenous youth in the province of Saskatchewan, a Canadian Indigenous group said. It was the largest such discovery to date.

Just weeks ago, the remains of 215 children were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of another former boarding school in British Columbia. For decades, Indigenous Canadians suggested through their oral histories that thousands of children had disappeared from these schools, but they were often met with skepticism.

“This was a crime against humanity, an assault on a First Nation people,” Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations said yesterday. “The only crime we ever committed as children was being born Indigenous.”

Context: A federal commission in 2015 found that the residential school system, which forced Indigenous children to assimilate into Western culture, was a form of “cultural genocide,” in which students were abused by members of the clergy and confronted with disease, death and danger.