Another 160 graves have been discovered near a boarding school for Aboriginal children in Canada

Another 160 graves have been discovered near a boarding school for Aboriginal children in Canada

In Canada, dozens of unidentified graves have been found on the site of a former boarding school for Aboriginal children. Penilacott chief Joan Brown said that more than 160 graves have been discovered in the yards of the former school on Cooper Island. At boarding school on the island west of Vancouver, Aboriginal children were educated from the late 19th century to 1975.

“It breaks my heart,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said after the discovery became known on Tuesday. “We can’t bring back those who died, but we can and we will uncover the truth and we will continue to work with Indigenous communities to fight discrimination and structural racism.”

In the past few weeks, more than a thousand unidentified mass graves of Aboriginal children have been discovered near four different boarding schools in Canada. The discoveries sparked horror across the country.

In Canada, since 1874, about 150,000 children of indigenous and mixed couples have been separated from their families and cultures and placed in church homes in an attempt to force them to conform to the white majority community. Many of them were abused or sexually assaulted in the home. According to previous information, at least 4,000 of these children died, many of them from tuberculosis. The last of these schools did not close until the 1990s.

France Press agency