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Williams Lake in Canada: Apparently dozens more graves of indigenous children discovered

2022-01-26T11:34:22.195Z


For months, experts in Canada have been discovering anonymous graves at several former boarding schools. A find has now also been reported in Williams Lake. Justin Trudeau writes his heart is broken.


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Williams Lake, British Columbia: Dozens of suspected graves discovered

Photo: John Elk III / Getty Images

In Canada, dozens of anonymous graves have apparently been discovered on the site of a former boarding school for Aboriginal children.

Geophysical surveys have found 93 suspected graves at the former school in Williams Lake, British Columbia, the local indigenous community said.

Community leader Willie Sellars said excavations are needed to determine whether the suspected graves actually contained human remains.

A lot of work is still needed for this.

So far, 14 of 470 hectares around the former St. Joseph's Mission Residential School have been surveyed.

According to Whitney Spearing, who is leading the investigation, the evidence so far suggests that some sites have a high probability of being human remains and others have a low probability of being human remains.

»Painful Emotions«

Thousands of children were housed in the boarding school from 1886 to 1981.

It had been opened by the Catholic Church and, according to the indigenous community, was mainly run by Catholic missionaries on behalf of the Canadian government.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the news of the possible graves "resurrected many painful emotions." The thought of "the members of the community and those whose loved ones have never come home" makes his "heart break," he wrote on Twitter.

Canada has been rocked by a scandal over the treatment of indigenous people for months.

In May 2021, the remains of 215 Indigenous children were discovered on the site of the former Catholic boarding school near the small town of Kamloops - just a few hours' drive from Williams Lake.

So far, more than a thousand anonymous graves of indigenous children have been discovered near various boarding schools.

The finds triggered horror, UN human rights experts called for a comprehensive explanation of the background.

In Canada, around 150,000 Aboriginal children had been separated from their families and placed in church homes since 1874 in order to force them to adapt to the white majority society.

Many of them were mistreated in the homes or sexually abused.

At least 4,000 of these children died, many of them from tuberculosis.

According to the authorities, 4,000 to 6,000 children are still missing.

The last of these schools only closed in the 1990s.

A national commission of inquiry described the treatment of indigenous children as “cultural genocide”.

ptz/AFP/AP

Source: spiegel

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