‘Heartbreaking’: Children remains were found from a former indigenous school site in Canada

Ottawa: On Friday, a discovery Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau explained as heartbreaking, the remains of 215 children, on which, some as young as three years old, were found at the site of a former residential school for indigenous children.

According to the Tk’emlúps te Secwe?pemc Nation, the children who were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978, said the remains were found with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify,” Tk’emlúps te Secwe?pemc Chief Rosanne Casimir said in a statement. “At this time, we have more questions than answers.”

Canada’s residential school system, which established “cultural genocide,” forcibly separated indigenous children from their families, a six-year investigation into the now-inoperative system found in 2015.

Some 150,000 Indian, Inuit and Metis youngsters in total were forcibly enrolled in these schools, where students were physically and sexually abused by headmasters and teachers who stripped them of their culture and language. It was typically run by Christian churches on behalf of Ottawa from the 1840s to the 1990s.

While attending residential school, it found more than 4,100 children died. The 215 children buried in the grounds of what was once Canada’s largest residential school are believed to not have been included in that figure and appear to have been undocumented until the discovery.

Trudeau wrote in a tweet that the news “breaks my heart – it is a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history.”

The Canadian government formally apologized for the system, in 2008.

According to the Tk’emlúps te Secwe?pemc Nation, it was engaging with the coroner and reaching out to the home communities whose children attended the school. They expect to have preliminary findings by mid-June.

British Columbia Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee called finding such gravesites “urgent work” that “refreshes the grief and loss for all First Nations in British Columbia.”