After the discovery of 751 graves at another former boarding school for Indigenous children long run by the Catholic Church, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has asked Pope Francis to apologize. During a conversation, he emphasized the importance of the head of the church “apologizing to indigenous Canadians on Canadian soil,” said Trudeau on Saturday night.
The day before, representatives of the Cowessess people had announced the find. The facility south of the city of Regina in central Canada was in operation from 1899 to 1997. The Cowessess people took over the facility from the Catholic Church in the 1980s. In recent weeks, the natives had searched the school grounds and an adjacent cemetery for human remains with radar devices.
First find in May
It was not until the end of May that a mass grave with 215 children was found at another boarding school for indigenous people in Kamloops in the west of the country. From the 17th century until the 1990s, the institutions known as “residential schools” were administered and funded by the government. Most of the operators were churches and religious organizations.
Indigenous children were torn from their families and placed in these facilities, where they had to learn the traditions of the European colonialists in order to forget their own language and culture. Violence and sexual abuse were commonplace there. A total of 150,000 Aboriginal and mixed couple children were placed in such facilities. According to previous information, at least 3,200 of these children died. But there are also estimates of up to 6000 dead children.
Churches were set on fire
Now two Catholic churches have been destroyed again by fire in Kamloops near where the mass grave was found. The Canadian federal police said that both the Church of St. Ann in the Upper Similkameen indigenous area and the Chopaka Church in the Lower Similkameen area caught fire within an hour early on Saturday morning.
“Both churches were destroyed,” said a statement from the police, who classified the fires as “suspicious”. It will be checked whether there is a connection to the church fires in the cities of Penticton and Oliver, about 50 kilometers away, a week ago.
“Harmful Politics”
Many indigenous communities now blame the homes that have shaped entire generations for social problems such as alcoholism, domestic violence and increased suicide rates. Canada’s government formally apologized to boarding school survivors in 2008. In 2015, a commission of inquiry found that they were victims of a “cultural genocide”.
Canada’s Prime Minister Trudeau again apologized over the weekend for “the harmful policies of forced assimilation” and made the Canadian government responsible.
