A painful story

More than 200 children’s remains have been found at the site of a former residential school for indigenous children in Canada. Canada’s indigenous people, the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc tribe, said in a statement that the remains of 215 children have been discovered on the grounds of a former boarding school set up more than a century ago to assimilate Canada’s indigenous people, according to a local tribe (“Remains of 215 children found in Canada school,” Gulf Today, May 30).

The story of the remains of the students who attended the school near Kamloops, British Columbia caused me great sadness. A specialist used ground-penetrating radar to confirm “some were as young as three years old.”

Chief Rosanne Casimir called it “an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by school administrators.”

In the meantime, the tribe is working with the coroner and museums to try to shed further light on the horrific discovery and find any records of these deaths. It is also reaching out to the students’ home communities across British Columbia and beyond.

It was operated by the Catholic Church on behalf of the Canadian government from 1890 to 1969.

Some 150,000 Indian, Inuit and Metis youngsters in total were forcibly enrolled in these schools, where students were abused by headmasters and teachers who stripped them of their culture and language. Today those experiences are blamed for a high incidence of poverty, alcoholism and domestic violence, and high suicide rates, in their communities. Ottawa formally apologised in 2008 for what the commission later termed a “cultural genocide” as part of a $1.6 billion settlement with former students.

Anand Kumar
By email