{"id":237184,"date":"2021-06-25T07:31:09","date_gmt":"2021-06-25T07:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=237184"},"modified":"2021-06-26T05:48:58","modified_gmt":"2021-06-26T05:48:58","slug":"canada-discovers-751-unmarked-graves-at-former-residential-school","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=237184","title":{"rendered":"Canada discovers 751 unmarked graves at former residential school"},"content":{"rendered":"

Leyland Cecco \u2013 The Guardian June 24, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

A First Nation in Canada\u2019s Saskatchewan province is treating a now-defunct residential school as a \u201ccrime scene\u201d following the discovery of 751 unmarked graves just weeks after a similar discovery in British Columbia<\/a> prompted a fresh reckoning over the country\u2019s colonial past.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Kamloops residential school in British Columbia was the site of another mass burial. Here more than 200 bodies were found. Click to enlarge<\/p><\/div>\n

Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation said that the graves were found on the site of the Marieval Indian residential school<\/a>, also known as Grayson, after a search with ground-penetrating radar was launched on 2 June.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not a mass grave site. These are unmarked graves,\u201d said Delorme at a press conference on Thursday morning, adding that the discovery has \u201creopened the pain\u201d that many suffered at the school. \u201cThe grave site is there. It is real.\u201d<\/p>\n

From the 19th century, more than 150,000 First Nations children<\/a> were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society.<\/p>\n

The children were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and thousands died from disease, neglect and suicide.<\/p>\n

Cowessess First Nation said that the number of unmarked graves at the site is \u201cthe most significantly substantial to date in Canada\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is not known how many of the remains belong to children or if any adults were also buried, Delorme said. He added that local residents alleged that the graves\u2019 headstones were illegally removed. \u201cWe didn\u2019t remove these headstones. Removing headstones is a crime in this country. And we are treating this like a crime scene.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last month the remains of 215 children, some as young as three, were found buried<\/a> on the site of what was once Canada\u2019s largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia.<\/p>\n

The Marieval school operated from 1898 to 1996 about 87 miles east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan. The Cowessess First Nation took over the school\u2019s cemetery from the Catholic church in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

News of the discovery prompted a fresh outpouring of grief and frustration from national leaders.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are seeing the results of the genocide that Canada committed \u2013 genocide on our treaty land,\u201d said chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nation. \u201cCanada will be known as a nation that tried to exterminate the First Nations. Now we have evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2015, Canada\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission described the schools policy as one of \u201ccultural genocide<\/a>\u201d. In recent weeks, there have been growing calls for the Catholic church, which operated many of the schools, to release its records on the institutions.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur people deserve more than apologies and sympathies, which we are grateful for. Our people deserve justice,\u201d said Cameron.<\/p>\n

The Assembly of First Nations national chief, Perry Bellegarde, who comes from Little Bear First Nation in the the province of Saskatchewan, tweeted that the latest discovery is \u201cabsolutely tragic, but not surprising\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI urge all Canadians to stand with First Nations in this extremely difficult and emotional time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The grim discovery brings the total of unmarked graves discovered in the past month to about 1,000, with experts predicting more will come as provincial governments announce funding to help Indigenous communities conduct their own searches.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will do a search on every Indian residential school site and we will not stop there. We will also search all of the sanatoriums and Indian hospitals and all the sites where people were abused or neglected and murdered,\u201d said Cameron. \u201cWe will tell the stories of our children of our people who died, who were killed by the state, by the churches. We won\u2019t stop.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Canadian government formally apologized in parliament in 2008 and admitted that physical and sexual abuse in the schools was rampant.<\/p>\n

\u201cI always wonder how a person who\u2019s supposed to be a Christian person, a priest, can abuse a seven-year-old girl,\u201d Carol Lavallee, who was taken from her home at age six in a cattle truck to attend Marieval, told a provincial healing gathering in 2007.<\/p>\n

Many students recall being beaten for speaking their native languages; they also lost touch with their parents and customs.<\/p>\n

Indigenous leaders have argued that the legacy of abuse and intergenerational trauma persists today as the root cause of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reservations.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the pain that we see in our in our people right now comes from there,\u201d elder Florence Florence Sparvier, a former residential school student, told reporters at the press conference. \u201cThey made us believe we didn\u2019t have souls.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both Cameron and Delorme said the work was only the beginning in a long process of identifying and properly commemorating those who died.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will find more bodies and we will not stop until we find all of our children,\u201d said Cameron.<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest discovery means that literally thousands of Native American children have been found buried in unmarked graves <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Hidden_and_Revisionist_History"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=237184"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":237204,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237184\/revisions\/237204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=237184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=237184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=237184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}