The “horrible and shocking” story of the discovery of 750 school graves in Canada

Indigenous people in Canada claim to have found 751 previously unknown graves in an old school in Saskatchewan, one of the country’s provinces.

The Cowessess First Nation (indigenous entity in the region) said the discovery was “the most important to date in Canada”.

This information comes weeks after the discovery of the remains of 215 children. The bones were found in a similar school, but in the province of British Columbia.

“We are not asking for pity but for understanding,” said Cadmus Delorme, President of Kwesis.

Marieval Indian Residential School operated from 1899 to 1997 in the area where the Cowessess Indian people are now located, in southeast Saskatchewan.

The school was one of more than 130 compulsory boarding schools run by the Canadian government and religious authorities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was part of the policy to integrate Aboriginal children into Canadian society, a movement that also destroyed Aboriginal cultures and languages.

An estimated 6,000 children were killed while attending these schools, in large part due to poor sanitary conditions at the sites. Students were often housed in poorly built, poorly heated and unsanitary facilities.

Physical and sexual assaults perpetrated by school authorities caused many people to flee schools.

“They made us think we didn’t have a soul,” Florence Sparvier, a former boarding school student, said at a news conference Thursday. “They were demeaning us as people, so we were taught not to love who we are.”

Last month, the Cowessess community began using ground-penetrating radar to locate unidentified graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School Cemetery in Saskatchewan.

The people of Koyes described the discovery as “horrific and appalling”.

Berry Bellegaard, national president of the Aboriginal Caucus of Canada, described the discovery of the tombs as “tragic, but not surprising”. “I urge all Canadians to support Indigenous Peoples at this very difficult time,” he wrote on Twitter.

Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in these schools.

Children were often not allowed to speak their mother tongue or practice their culture, and many were mistreated and abused.

A commission launched in 2008 to document the effects of this system found that large numbers of Indigenous children never returned to their communities of origin.

In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized for the system.