Canada to help indigenous search for more student graves

A program of excavations at boarding schools across Canada will be expanded after remains of 215 children were discovered at one site.

A makeshift memorial to the children who never came home, made up of hundreds of pairs of shoes, at the Francis Xavier Church, in Quebec. Picture: AFP.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has promised to expand a program of excavations at old boarding schools across Canada after remains of 215 children were discovered at one site.

“As a dad, I can’t imagine what it would feel like to have my kids taken away from me,” Mr Trudeau said. “And as Prime Minister, I am appalled by the shameful policy that stole indigenous children from their communities.

“Think of their communities that never saw them again. Think of their hopes, their dreams, their potential, of all they would have accomplished, all they would have become. All of that was taken away.”

Mr Trudeau, who has made reconciliation with Canada’s nearly 1.7 million indigenous people a priority of his government since coming to power in 2015, said he would order his ministers to do all they could to “to support (residential school) survivors and the community”.

Excavating school burial sites, he said, was “an important part of discovering the truth”. “Canada will be there to support indigenous communities as we discover the extent of this trauma and trying to give opportunities for families and communities to heal.”

The local Tk’emlups te Secwepemc tribe said last week it had used ground-penetrating radar to confirm the remains of the students who attended a school near Kamloops in British Columbia.

The Kamloops Indian Residential School was the largest of 139 boarding schools set up in the late 19th century to assimilate Canada’s indigenous peoples, with up to 500 students registered and attending at any one time.

It was operated by the Catholic Church on behalf of the Canadian government from 1890 to 1969, before Ottawa took over its administration and closed it a decade later.

Official records showed only 50 deaths at the school.

As the nation mourned, flags on government buildings were lowered to half mast. Rows of children’s shoes were left in front of parliament in Ottawa and outside government offices and churches in several cities, forming makeshift memorials.

Perry Bellegarde, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told the Globe and Mail newspaper that former students and families “deserve to know the truth”.

“A thorough investigation into all former residential school sites could lead to more truths of the genocide against our people,” he said.

The British Columbia coroner is helping the local tribe establish the causes and timings of the student deaths in Kamloops.

On Monday (Tuesday AEST), opposition parties asked for – and Mr Trudeau agreed to – an emergency debate in parliament on the “heartbreaking” discovery.

More than 150,000 children were forcibly enrolled in the schools, where students were physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers who stripped them of their culture and language.

Today those experiences are blamed for a high incidence of poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence, as well as high suicide rates, in indigenous communities.

A truth and reconciliation commission has identified the names of, or information about, at least 4100 children who died from abuse or neglect while attending a residential school. It estimates the actual toll is much higher.

The commission concluded in a 2015 report that more than a century of abuses at the schools amounted to “cultural genocide”.

Seven years earlier, Ottawa had formally apologised as a part of a $C1.9 billion ($2 billion) settlement with former students.

AFP