Trudeau Says Canada Failed Indigenous Community Over Child Mass Grave at Former School

TORONTO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st June, 2021) Canada has failed the country's indigenous community, namely the children whose remains were found at a mass grave site at a former residential school in the province of British Columbia, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday.

The Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced on Thursday that a deep scan of the Kamloops Indian Residential School site with ground-penetrating radar confirmed the discovery of 215 children's remains, with some of the deceased as young as three years old.

"Our country failed them, it failed their communities and their families. That is the truth and that is the truth we must all face," Trudeau said in an address at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM)'s Annual Conference.

There will be "much work" ahead in the coming weeks and months to address the situation, according to Trudeau, who said that he convened a cabinet meeting on Monday to discuss concrete steps the government could take.

Meanwhile, the grisly discovery has prompted politicians and indigenous leaders across the country to call for action.

On Monday, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Perry Bellegarde urged the authorities to launch a probe into all former residential school sites, noting that indigenous survivors have long been trying to draw attention to the issue but nobody believed them.

Kamloops was one of the largest schools in Canada and operated from the late XIX century to the late 1970s as part of the residential school system, which placed indigenous children in state-sanctioned boarding schools where they were to be culturally assimilated.

According to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, released in 2015, roughly 150,000 aboriginal children were forcibly assimilated through the residential schools from 1883 to 1998, in a process equated to "cultural genocide."

The report discovered that around 3,200 died in the schools, with the greatest number of deaths taking place before 1940. Schools also had high rates of tuberculosis and other health incidences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with death rates remaining high until the 1950s.