Mass Graves of Indigenous Children in Canada

It would appear that Canada is no different from the United States in having a strong tradition to want to promote white supremacy. 

A mass grave containing the remains of 215 children has been found in that country at a former residential school set up to assimilate Indigenous people. The youngsters were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia that closed in 1978. 

The discovery was announced on Thursday by the chief of the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation. The remains were found with the help of a ground-penetrating radar during a survey of the school. 

"To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths", Rosanne Casimir (left), the chief of the community in British Columbia's city of Kamloops said. "Some were as young as three years old". 

For more than 100 years, Canadian authorities forcibly separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families and made them attend residential schools, which aimed to sever Indigenous family and cultural ties and assimilate the children into white Canadian society. 

The schools, which were run by churches from the 1870s until 1996, were rife with physical, mental and sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of violence, and they created a cycle of intergenerational trauma for Indigenous people across Canada. 

Founded in 1890 and run by the Catholic Church, the Kamloops Indian Residential School eventually became the largest school in Canada’s residential school system, counting 500 children at its enrollment peak in the early 1950s. 

“The residential schools were opened with the sole purpose of removing the Indian from the child”, Danielle Morrison (left), an Anishinaabe lawyer said. “It was to assimilate Indigenous people in Canada and it’s essentially, in the words of one of the superintendents at the time, to get rid of the ‘Indian problem’”. 

In 2015, a national truth and reconciliation commission said the Canadian government had committed “cultural genocide” by forcing more than 150,000 Indigenous children to attend residential schools. 

The Canadian government formally apologized for the residential school system in 2008, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (right) said on Friday that the discovery of the children’s bodies “is a painful reminder of that dark and shameful chapter of our country’s history”. 

But wait, don't think that this is all in the past! 

It has been pointed out that while the residential schools may have been closed, Indigenous children continue to be taken away from their families in disproportionate numbers across Canada. 

According to census data, more than 52 percent of children in foster care in 2016 were Indigenous, while Indigenous children made up only 7.7 percent of the country’s total population. 

“This is not a historical event”, said Karen Joseph (right), CEO of the Reconciliation Canada charity on Saturday. “This continues today – the loss of our children and the loss of our people for no other reason than the color of our skin”. 

Canada is another “white” country that persists in imposing its “white values" on non-white societies – shame on Canada!