STATUES OF QUEEN VICTORIA, QUEEN ELIZABETH II TOPPLED IN CANADA

Fri 02 July 2021:

Statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II have been toppled in Canada during an Every Child Matters rally in the Canadian city of Winnipeg, amid growing outrage over the discovery of unmarked graves belonging to Indigenous children.

The rally was held on Thursday, which was also Canada Day. It comes as numerous unmarked child graves have been discovered across Canada on the territory of former residential schools. In the 20th century, indigenous children were forcibly sent to such schools to be assimilated into European Canadian society.

The toppled monument of Queen Victoria stood at a square near the Manitoba legislature. The demonstrators left red handprints on the statue and an inscription saying “We were children once.

Demonstrators toppled statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth in Winnipeg during rallies honouring the children discovered in unmarked graves on the sites of former residential schools over the past month.#Canada pic.twitter.com/W6iBwEQD69

— INDEPENDENT PRESS (@IpIndependent) July 2, 2021

Police arrested one of protesters, using a stun gun against him. According to the broadcaster, the arrested man was possibly angry at those who had toppled the monument to Queen Victoria.

The demonstrators also pulled down a smaller statue of Queen Elizabeth II, who is Canada’s head of state.

Almost 1,000 unmarked graves have been found at former residential schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan that were mainly run by the Catholic Church and funded by the government.

For 165 years and as recently as 1996, the schools forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families, subjecting them to malnourishment and physical and sexual abuse in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called “cultural genocide” in 2015.

In 2015, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission established that some 150,000 indigenous minors forcibly went through the assimilation school system from 1883 to 1998. About 3,200 children died in the schools, which were hotspots of various diseases, including tuberculosis.

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