No remains unearthed yet from Canada’s residential school grave sites

  By Zelda Caldwell, Katie Yoder for CNA

July 25, 2022 Catholic News AgencyPrint

A teddy bear sits beside a lantern outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School where flowers and cards have been left as part of a growing makeshift memorial created in response to media reports that the "remains" of 215 children have been discovered buried near the facility in Kamloops on June 5, 2021. / Cole Burston /AFP via Getty Images

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jul 25, 2022 / 18:48 pm (CNA).

On May 27, 2021, the news broke that unmarked graves containing the remains of indigenous children had been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in British Columbia.

The Kamloops Indian residential school, which operated from the late 19th century to the late 1970s, was among Canada’s government-sponsored schools run by the Catholic Church to forcibly assimilate indigenous children.

More than a year later, no bodies have been discovered at the Kamloops site. It is not clear whether the graves said to have been discovered there actually exist.

The topic of the residential schools has come back into focus on the occasion of Pope Francis’ penitential trip to Canada. In apologizing for the Catholic Church’s role in operating Canada’s government-sponsored residential school system, he regretted the “cultural destruction and forced assimilation” inflicted on the indigenous people of the country. Indigenous children were taken from their families and forbidden to speak their native languages.

As a “starting point” the pope called for “a serious investigation into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered.”

Read the rest: https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/07/25/no-remains-unearthed-yet-from-canadas-residential-school-grave-sites/