Justin Trudeau at the site of a former residential school
Canada has been shaken for several months by the revelations made about the former residential schools for Aboriginal children.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in Brussels on March 24, 2022.
AFP
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met on Wednesday with an indigenous community in the west of the country who had identified 93 graves on the site of a former boarding school, in the wake of the scandal which shook the country.
The visit of the head of government to the First Nation of Williams Lake in British Columbia (west) comes as Pope Francis receives this week indigenous delegations from Canada, a meeting presented as “historic” to discuss the drama of residential schools managed by the Church in this country.
“I am moved to be here,” said Justin Trudeau, in front of leaders, elders and former students of the institution which welcomed thousands of children from 1886 to its closure in 1981. “All of Canada mourns with this community” since that discovery, he said, noting “the profound loss this community has felt over the generations because of the scars left by residential schools.”
“Supporting the Healing”
The Canadian government also announced on Wednesday additional funding of 2.9 million Canadian dollars (about 2 million francs) to “support the healing” of First Nations communities in this western Canadian province, according to a press release.
Later that day, Justin Trudeau asserted that residential schools are part of “our history as a country, and until we get it right…and we commit to (doing) better, we will not live up to the kind of country we all like to think we are”.
“We have work to do”, he added, believing, once again, that reconciliation “also requires a response and an apology from the Catholic Church and the Pope”.
Searches across the country
At the end of January, the indigenous community announced that it had identified 93 “potential human burials”, on the site of this former boarding school which was managed “by various religious sects”, and mainly by Catholic missionaries on the orders of the Canadian government.
This preliminary search had been carried out using geo-radar on a perimeter of approximately 14 hectares, among the 480 that make up the site of the former St. Joseph’s Mission boarding school, approximately 300 kilometers north of Kamloops where the remains of 215 children were found at the end of May. In total, about 1,300 unmarked graves have been found since May on the sites of former boarding schools. And there’s a lot of research going on across the country.
Between the end of the 19th century and the 1990s, some 150,000 indigenous children were forcibly enrolled in more than 130 boarding schools across the country where they were cut off from their families, their language and their culture. A national commission of inquiry had called this system “cultural genocide”.
You found an error?Please let us know.