Canadian Indigenous Chief: 'Nobody Can Deny Residential Schools Were The Genocide Of Our People'

Indigenous Canadians are mourning the loss of 215 children whose remains were found in a mass grave at a former residential school in British Columbia.

The Kamloops Indian Residential School was one of about 130 just like it that operated from the late 1800s to the late 1960s. First Nations children were forcibly taken there to be assimilated into Christian culture.

Some of the remains of children found at the site were as young as 3 years old, says National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Perry Bellegarde.

The gravesite was discovered using ground-penetrating radar. Many graves like this have been found over the years at residential schools in Canada.

No record of these 215 deaths existed before now because of coverups and lack of documentation, Bellegarde says.

“A lot of the survivors knew of these gravesites, but nobody believed them,” he says. “Here's the tragic, painful evidence of gravesites being found. And so now nobody can deny that the residential schools were a genocide of our people.”

Canada’s residential school system forcibly took children from their families and placed them in institutions rife with physical, mental and sexual abuse, he says. The overcrowded schools had poor health conditions and the children suffered malnutrition.

The schools aimed to assimilate First Nations children into Christian Canadian culture. Children were forbidden to speak their indigenous languages, isolated from their families and forced to cut their long hair, he says.

Canada’s Indian Act of 1876 forbade First Nations people from leaving reservations without a permit and hiring lawyers until 1951, he says. And First Nations people couldn’t vote until 1960.

These restrictions prevented parents and grandparents from leaving the reservation to check on their children, he says. When children went missing, guardians often weren’t notified and the schools would explain the disappearance as a runaway.

“This is just scratching the surface and revealing a great pain that's going to have to be dealt with soon because there's a lot of hurt,” he says. “People can't go on and in a lot of cases, a lot of questions [are] left unanswered.”

Canada established the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation in 2008. The center estimated that 4,100 kids died at these schools. But Bellegarde says that number only scratches the surface.

The 4,100 number comes from existing records, he says, but many deaths went undocumented and some records from churches have not yet been shared.

“When you don't document death and you don't commemorate it, you don't mark it, there's something wrong with that,” he says.

..........