© KEYSTONE/AP/Darryl Dyck
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with an Indigenous community in western Canada on Wednesday. She had identified 93 graves on the site of a former boarding school, in the wake of the scandal that 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.
Additional funding
“All of Canada mourns with this community” since this discovery, he said, noting “the profound loss this community has felt over generations because of the legacy of residential schools.”
The Canadian government also announced on Wednesday additional funding of 2.9 million Canadian dollars (2.1 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 commit to (do) better, we won’t live up to the kind of country we all like to think we are.”
“We have work to do,” he added, saying, once again, that reconciliation “also requires a response and an apology from the Catholic Church and the Pope.”
“Cultural Genocide”
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 described this system as “cultural genocide”.