During searches carried out in the kindergarten of the Marieval boarding school in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, graves with the remains of 751 bodies of children were found which are not found in the official records.
Cadmus Delorme, the head of the First Nation Indigenous people of the Cowessess Region, where the tombs are located, told a news conference that 751 tombs that are not in the official records so far have been discovered as a result of work done since the beginning of this month.
“This is not a mass grave, these are graves without names,” said leader Delorme.
Stating that graves should contain signs, Delorme said the Roman Catholic Church, which managed the cemetery, removed the marks from the graves in the 1960s.
According to official Canadian data, the Marieval Indigenous Ecclesiastical School operated from 1899 to 1997 in the Cowessess region, about 40 miles[140 km]east of the provincial capital, Regina.
Following the discovery of unregistered graves with the remains of 215 children in the residential school garden in Kamlopps, British Columbia on May 29, new graves were discovered in Canada as a result of deep penetration radar scans launched at 139 schools across the country. country.
Former boarding schools, which Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has described as “one of the darkest chapters in Canadian history”, have recently attracted international attention with mass graves found in their gardens.
A total of 139 boarding ecclesiastical schools, the first of which was opened by the Catholic Church in 1840 on behalf of the Canadian government and the last closed in 1997, became places where more than 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly removed by their families during the years they operated.
Forced to leave their families and cultures to integrate into white majority communities, most children were mistreated, subjected to sexual and physical abuse, and sentenced to starvation and cold.
While in 2008 the then Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Joseph Harper apologized on behalf of the state for what happened in the boarding schools, in the same year a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up in the country to uncover all the dimensions of tragedy.
Listening to more than 6,000 surviving victims, the commission completed its work in 2015 and prepared a 4,000-page report.
Defining the events in the report as “cultural genocide”, the commission made recommendations to the government in 94 articles to address the problem.
In some sources, the number of children who died while staying in church schools is given as 4,200, while the commission report states that this number was 5,995, as the deaths were not documented by church administrations.
It was also found that ecclesiastical school officials, who forcibly took from their families the children of indigenous tribes in the regions where they had settled, had conducted medical experiments on children and sexual and physical abuse.