Wed 16 June 2021:
The Canadian province of Ontario announced that it is making available $8.2 million for indigenous communities to study former residential school sites following the discovery of a mass grave at a site in British Columbia.
The announcement follows the grisly discovery of 215 children’s remains, with some of the deceased as young as three years old, at the Kamloops Indian Residential School site in British Columbia.
“We know that the tragic findings at a former Indian Residential School site in British Columbia are sadly not an anomaly,” Greg Rickford, Ontario’s Minister of Indigenous Affairs, said in press release on Tuesday. “Indigenous leaders and Ontarians are looking to governments to commit to the work of investigating Indigenous Residential School burial sites on a priority basis and our government is taking action to support this process through to completion.”
The mission will be community-led, the province said, with the $8.2 million in funding going towards identifying technical experts, including archaeologists and forensic specialists to lead the investigation, the release said.
According to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, released in 2015, roughly 150,000 aboriginal children were forcibly assimilated through the residential schools from 1883 to 1998, in a process equated to “cultural genocide.”
The report discovered that around 3,200 died in the schools, with the greatest number of deaths taking place before 1940. Schools also had high rates of tuberculosis and other health incidences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with death rates remaining high until the 1950s. The last residential school closed in 1996.
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