Under the title "Second in Canada: Discovery of a Mass Grave at a Former School Site," Sky News Arabia reported on a second incident within weeks of finding 751 unidentified graves at the site of a former Catholic residential school in Canada, according to a group of Indigenous people in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan on Thursday. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed that the news of the discovery at the "Marieval Indian Residential School," located 140 kilometers from Regina, the provincial capital, was "extremely upsetting." He added to the Indigenous community, "The harm and trauma you feel are shared by all of Canada."
The police chief told reporters that it was unclear how many remains belonged to children, adding that the church that operated the school had removed the gravestones. He stated, "We did not move the gravestones. Removing gravestones is a crime in this country. We are treating the site as a crime scene," as reported by Reuters.
It is noteworthy that a large mass grave of children was discovered in late May in western Canada, which recalls the suffering of Indigenous people in the country when children were forcibly removed from their families to forget their native culture. According to The New York Times, the remains of 215 children were found, including young ones who were only three years old at the time of their death. The remains were located within a residential school that compelled children to stay away from their families in British Columbia, in the far west of the country. When a child disappeared mysteriously, families did not necessarily receive their bodies for burial, and sometimes they were provided with unconvincing or vague accounts.
The residential school system, which operated from 1831 to 1996, involved the removal of approximately 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and bringing them to Catholic residential schools run on behalf of the federal government. The school where the grave was found opened its doors in 1890 to welcome Indigenous children and operated until the 1970s. A survivor of the "horrific schools" stated that children would suddenly disappear and were not safe from sexual assault and various other abuses.
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission established five years ago described what occurred in these schools as "cultural genocide." The commission's data indicated that nearly 4,100 young children died in those schools, whether due to abuse or neglect. Indigenous children were prohibited in these schools from speaking their native language or practicing their cultural rituals, and those who disobeyed faced severe penalties.
