People across Canada are mourning the “cultural genocide” that Indigenous children were subjected to in the former residential school system, after the remains of 215 children, some as young as three years old, were found on the site of the largest of such schools.
The children were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978, the largest of these government-run schools.
These schools were mainly led by the catholic church, which forcibly separated indigenous children from their families and communities and denied them their culture rights to forcibly assimilate them.
A 2015 report documented horrific malnutrition, physical abuse, rape and other horrors perpetrated against many of the 150,000 children who attended these schools.
The report also documented that over 4,100 children died. "To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” said Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Nation.
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