The remains of 215 Aboriginal children have been found at a former Canadian boarding school

Toronto (Canada), May 28 (EFE). – The remains of at least 215 Aboriginal children have been found in an old school residence in western Canada, according to a group of Indigenous residents on Friday, who said the bodies corresponded with disappeared children, whose deaths have not been documented.

Rosan Casimir, president of tk’emlúps te secwépemc, an indigenous group from British Columbia in western Canada, said in a statement that the remains were found last weekend on the grounds of the Kamloops school residence.

“In our society, we had doubts that we were able to verify them. As far as we know, these missing children are undocumented deaths,” Casimir said, adding that some of them were less than three years old.

The Aboriginal group discovered the bodies using ground penetrating radar so that the remains would not be altered and indicated that the search would continue in the Kamloops School grounds.

The original group added: “By accessing this technology, we hope that real accounts of missing students will provide some peace and outcome for those who have lost their lives and their communities.”

The Government of Canada established the school residence system at the beginning of the nineteenth century to accommodate the indigenous people of the country; It was operating until the closure of the last such center in 1996.

School residences were in many cases run by religious groups. Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their communities and sent to these boarding schools, sometimes hundreds of kilometers from their original home.

Tens of thousands of Aboriginal children have been housed in school homes for years to make them forget their native customs and languages.

In many cases, children systematically suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuse, including torture. In some cases, Canadian authorities have conducted “scientific” experiments on them.

In 2017, the Canadian government formally apologized for the forced detention of Aboriginal children, and last year it identified two school residences where the violations had been committed as a National Historic Site in recognition of past mistakes. EFE

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