The floor remains of more than two hundred children were found in Canada in the area of a former Aboriginal boarding school.
Rosanne Casimir, the leader of a community called Tk’emlups te Secwepemc, said the remains of 215 children were found using a special sonar.
Some of the dead children may be only three years old.
The facility, run by the Catholic Church near the small town of Kamloops, opened over a hundred years ago with the goal of Forced integration of indigenous children into the European immigrant community. The deaths of the children were not documented by the then boarding school administration, although their disappearance was reported to the authorities by members of the original community.
It is not yet clear in what circumstances the young men died. The original community announced that it would work closely with forensic experts and local museums to investigate what happened. The preliminary investigation report is expected in June, MTI writes.
The boarding school, which opened in 1890, had about five hundred students in the 1950s. The institution closed in 1969.
According to the local Aboriginal community, in 1910, the then head of Kamloops School complained that the government did not provide sufficient resources to adequately feed the students. This of course does not mean that the students of the school will starve, but it raises doubts.
At the end of the 19th century, 139 similar facilities were opened on behalf of the Canadian government.
In the North American country, beginning in 1874, about 150,000 Indian, Mastic, and Inuit children were separated from their families and cultures and then placed in boarding schools.
Many were mistreated or raped. At least 3,200 people died, most of them from tuberculosis.
Many Aboriginal communities in Canada blame the facilities that define the lives of several generations for current social problems. In 2008, the Ottawa leadership apologized to the survivors. In 2015, a commission of inquiry took the position that they had fallen victim to cultural genocide.
