On Tuesday, the Keeseekoose First Nation indigenous community in Canada announced that anonymous graves had been found again at former Catholic boarding schools.
It concerns 54 graves at two different locations. Last year, the world was shocked by the discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at former boarding schools in the country.
The graves were found near the former St. Philip’s and Fort Pelly boarding schools in eastern Saskatchewan Province. Both the boarding schools administered by the Catholic Church were open from 1905 to 1913 and from 1928 to 1969, respectively.
Just weeks ago, the Williams Lake First Nation indigenous community announced it had found evidence of 93 unmarked graves on the grounds of St. Joseph Mission, a boarding school in the province of British Columbia that closed in 1981.
In Canada, about 150,000 Indigenous children were sent to one of 139 boarding schools until the end of the last century. There they had to learn to adapt to the culture of the white inhabitants of Canada without contact with their families.
A national commission of inquiry previously spoke of more than 4,000 deaths in schools as a result of the “cultural genocide”.