Canada to Make $22.4Mln Available for Study of Indigenous School Sites - Minister

TORONTO (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 03rd June, 2021) The Canadian government is making $22.4 million available for indigenous communities to study former residential school sites following the discovery of a mass grave at a site in British Columbia, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett said on Wednesday.

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.

"Indigenous communities from coast to coast to coast are calling for support in this important but challenging work. Our government is there to support them," Bennett said during a press briefing, calling the $22.4 million a "step in the right direction."

Asked why this funding wasn't made available earlier, Bennett said that the indigenous communities and leaders have requested an indigenous-led, community-based and "survivor-centric" approach and the Federal government is moving at the pace of indigenous groups. The grisly discovery has prompted politicians and indigenous leaders across the country to call for action.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Tuesday that Canada has failed the country's indigenous community, namely the children whose remains were found at the mass gravesite.

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 19th 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.