'A very tough time for Canada:' Indigenous group finds 54 unmarked graves at schools sites
An Indigenous community in Canada says it has found evidence of dozens of more unmarked graves at the sites of two former residential schools in the country.
Keeseekoose First Nation announced on Tuesday the discovery of 54 graves near Fort Pelly and St Phillip's residential schools in the western province of Saskatchewan.
"The locations we're scanning were identified by survivors and knowledge keepers from oral history," said Ted Quewezance, the former chief of the First Nation and a residential school survivor.
"Ground-penetrating radar simply validated our oral history," he added.
Chief Lee Kitchimonia said that it was "a very tough time for our community knowing that we have unmarked graves in our community."
"We passed by them, never realizing that there were graves there," he said, adding, "Somebody has to be held accountable for it."
The latest discovery comes just weeks after the Williams Lake First Nation announced it had found evidence of 93 unmarked graves on the grounds of a former residential school in Canada's western province of British Columbia.
Canada was shocked in May 2021 after an indigenous community unmarked a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
Canada forced more than 150,000 Indigenous children to attend these government-funded compulsory boarding schools as part of a policy meant to assimilate indigenous children and destroy indigenous cultures and languages.
The children, who were stripped of their languages and culture, were also subjected to abuse, rape, and malnutrition. Thousands are believed to have died while attending those schools.
More than 130 residential schools were operated in Canada between 1874 and 1996.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which is a federal commission of inquiry into the institutions, concluded in 2015 that abuses in Canada's residential school system amounted to "cultural genocide." According to former TRC chair Murray Sinclair, some 6,000 children may have died in those schools.
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