Thu 31 August 2023:
A First Nation has found 79 suspected child grave sites and 14 potential infant grave sites at a former residential school in Saskatchewan, Canada, CTV News reported Tuesday.
“This is not a final number. It breaks my heart that there are likely more,” English River First Nation chief Jenny Wolverine was quoted as saying during a news conference in Saskatoon, the capital city of Saskatchewan in central Canada on Tuesday.
“We were not sure what to expect and what we would find. But we did know the stories that were shared over generations about the treatment of the students and those students who never returned home,” Wolverine said in the report.
According to the report, the English River chief called upon the federal and provincial governments to provide resources for the First Nation’s search effort.
English River started searching the site of the former Beauval Indian Residential School in August 2021, using ground-penetrating radar, the report said, adding that the research team is preparing to move into the second phase of the search.
Beauval Indian Residential School was first founded in 1860 and operated for more than 100 years, according to the University of Regina. In 2013, a former dormitory supervisor at the school was convicted of indecent assault and gross indecency for assaults on young boys between 1959 and 1967, CTV News reported.
Canada forced more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children to attend residential schools between the late 1800s and 1990s. The children were stripped of their languages and culture, separated from siblings, and subjected to psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Thousands are believed to have died while attending the institutions, which were run by various churches, most notably the Roman Catholic Church.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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