On May 27th, a mass grave containing approximately 215 bodies was found at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School is British Columbia.
According to Wikipedia, “The Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government’s Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created for the purpose of removing Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and assimilating them into the dominant, European-Canadian culture, “to kill the Indian in the child.” Over the course of the system’s more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s about 30 percent of Indigenous children were believed to be attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to an incomplete historical record, though estimates range from 3,200 to upwards of 6,000.”
The bodies were discovered by the he Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation using technology including ground penetrating radar, according to the CBC.
The flags of Canada and British Columbia fly at half mast in memory of these 215 indigenous people as well as the somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 indigenous students of the the Canadian residential schools who never returned home.
Cruesbreck Flags 