They found over 160 new graves near a native boarding school | The policy of brutal assimilation in Canada

the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, said he was “sorry” after the discovery of over 160 new anonymous graves near an Indigenous residential school on the island of Kuper, in the west of the country.

“It breaks my heart. We cannot bring back the dead, but we can continue to speak the truth in the same way that we will continue to work with indigenous peoples to fight against discrimination and systemic racism with real and concrete actions, ”Trudeau told reporters in a testimony collected by the AFP agency.

“We have to face, once again, the trauma that followed these acts of genocidePenelakut community leader Joan Brown said in a statement, confirming the discovery of more than 160 unidentified graves at the site.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said former Union of British Columbia Native Chiefs vice-president Bob Chamberlin, saying many other graves “have yet to be discovered”.

In a little over a month Over 1,000 graves have been found near boarding schools for Indigenous peoples, a remnant of Canada’s policy of forced assimilation, which shocks the country.

The Kuper Island Indian Residential School housed Indigenous children from the late 19th century until 1975.

The announcement came after the human remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in Kamloops, 751 unidentified graves in Marival and 182 more in Cranbrook.

Until the 1990s, some 150,000 Indigenous and Métis children and youth were forcibly interned in 139 residential schools run by the Catholic Church on behalf of the Canadian government, and more than 4,000 students are estimated to have died of illness and neglect. They also suffered physical restraint and sexual abuse from the regents or teachers who took them away from their culture and language.

In 2008, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized on behalf of Canadians for these residential schools.