Canadians fear discovery of more school graves, UN urges probe

TIL Desk/World/Toronto/ “Remains should be identified and forensic studies carried out to ensure proper identification of remains. Without this, healing is not possible,” the United Nations Human Rights Council told Canada on Wednesday. The discovery of the remains at the former Indian residential school in Kamloops in British Columbia led to calls on Tuesday for officially designating it as “genocide”.  

Indian-origin Opposition leader Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic Party said these schools were started with the aim of a “genocide” of indigenous people. “These residential schools were not schools; they were institutions designed to eradicate and eliminate Indigenous people. They were institutions that were designed to perpetuate a genocide,” he said.

Angry indigenous leaders wanted the Pope to apologise as Catholic missionaries ran these schools with government support. Canada’s first Prime Minister Sir John Macdonald too came under attack as he started these schools in 1883 and ordered Indigenous kids forcibly removed from their “savage” parents and placed in these schools.

Macdonald’s statue was removed from the city centre in Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, speaking in a House of Commons debate on the tragedy, expressed fears that there could be more unknown graves of indigenous kids at other Indian residential schools.