An Indigenous community in western Canada announced Thursday that it may have discovered unmarked graves and a child’s bone near a Canadian boarding school for Indigenous people.
For a year and a half, more than 1,300 children’s graves have been found near these facilities where Indigenous children have been forcibly enrolled, sending shockwaves across the country and a national awareness of its dark colonial past.
In Lebret, Saskatchewan, radar has spotted nearly “2,000 suspicious areas” that need a thorough search, the Star Blanket Cree community said Thursday.
An exact quantification of the number of graves is still impossible before further investigation, because not every “zone” is necessarily synonymous with anonymous burial, said Sheldon Poitras, who conducted the investigation.
However, a fragment of the jawbone of an approximately 125-year-old child was also discovered, providing “material evidence for the existence of an unmarked burial,” noted Sheldon Poitras.
“Our hearts are heavy today. It’s unimaginable,” said Michael Starr, the church leader.
On the advice of former students of the boarding school, the research areas close to this boarding school, managed by the Catholic Church and open until 1998, were chosen.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the announcement “difficult” and admitted “the work has only just begun”, promising government support every step of the way.
For Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller, “the discovery of the bones of a very young child on the grounds of Lebret Residential School is a tragic reminder of Canada’s painful history and the heinous acts committed in the boarding schools”.
Between the late 19th century and the 1990s, around 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly enrolled in 139 boarding schools across the country, where they were cut off from their family, language and culture.
Thousands never came back.
A national commission of inquiry in 2015 described this system as “cultural genocide”.