An indigenous community announced on Tuesday January 25 that its research had identified 93
“potential”
graves on the site of a former boarding school in western Canada, a few months after the scandal which shook the country.
This preliminary search was carried out using ground-penetrating radar and identified what could be
“potential human graves”
, Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia (west) said in a statement.
Read alsoIn the Canadian Far North, what future for the Inuit peoples?
They were carried out on a perimeter of about 14 hectares, among the 480 that make up the site of the former St. Joseph's Mission boarding school, located about 300 kilometers north of Kamloops where the remains of 215 children had been found at the end of May. .
The institution welcomed thousands of children between 1886 and this, until its closure, in 1981. It was managed
“by various religious sects”
, and mainly by Catholic missionaries on the orders of the Canadian government, explains the indigenous community which has about 800 members.
“There is still a lot of work to be done on the St Joseph site and we intend to continue
it,” assured its manager, Willie Sellars.
"Today's news from Williams Lake First Nation brings up many painful emotions
," said Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“My heart breaks for the members of the community and for those whose loved ones never came home
,” he added, in a tweet.
Read alsoWhy is Canada still in conflict with Native Americans?
In early January, Ottawa announced funding of 1.9 million Canadian dollars (1.3 million euros) to help the Williams Lake First Nation's investigation into this former residential school.
"To date, $116.8 million has been committed to help First Nations, Inuit and Métis survivors, their families and communities locate and commemorate missing children who attended residential schools,"
the report said. Canadian government in a press release.
In total, more than a thousand anonymous graves have been found since May on the sites of former boarding schools.
And many searches are underway throughout the country - between 4,000 and 6,000 students are said to have disappeared, according to the authorities.
Between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s, some 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly recruited into more than 130 boarding schools across the country where they were cut off from their families, language and culture.
A national commission of inquiry had called this system
“cultural genocide”
.