Last year, 215 bodies were found buried beneath a school in Canada. On Monday, their families received an apology.

This post deals with child abuse and sexual assault and might be triggering for some readers.

A red brick building stands in the city of Kamloops. 

It was once the largest residential school in Canada, with a granite chimney and stone detailing beneath dozens of perfectly symmetrical windows. 

The mountains of British Columbia rise and fall behind it, the entranceway of number 345 reading 'The Kamloops Indian Residential School'.

For decades, former students spoke of a sense of knowing. Knowing their classmates went to school one day and never came back.  

Then, last year, a ground penetrating radar specialist ran an antenna across the parameters of the school. This was the culmination of decades of advocacy from the First Nations community who demanded to know what lay beneath the school grounds. 

What they discovered was the bodies of 215 children, some as young as three years old. 

They had been buried without a tombstone, their lives erased from history.

But these are not the only mass graves hidden beneath schools in Canada. There are dozens more. 

Estimates vary, but experts believe there are between 3200 and 6000 children who died amid abuse and neglect in residential schools during the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Their deaths went entirely undocumented.

Canada's Stolen Generation.

The Canadian government set up and funded a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples which they called Indian residential schools in the late 19th century. 

Run by Christian churches, the system was an attempt to eradicate Indigenous culture and assimilate children into the European-Canadian culture. The government described the policy as an effort to "kill the Indian in the child".

In the 1920s, under law, children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to Indian residential schools from September to June. The only times they were permitted to visit their families, if at all, were Christmas and Easter. 

Over the 20th century, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools. They were not permitted to speak in their native language or practise their own spirituality. Some ran away. Others disappeared. 

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The mistreatment of students at residential schools is extensively documented. 

Corporal punishment was widespread. A lack of funding meant children were malnourished, and the schools were overcrowded with inadequate heating and a lack of any real medical care. Poor sanitation meant that influenza and tuberculosis spread rapidly, and at one school the death rate reached 69 per cent.

Students were also experimented on without their knowledge. Some were intentionally malnourished as part of nutrition experiments. Others were part of trials for vaccines, vitamin D supplements and other drugs. 

Many former students have relayed their experiences of severe physical, sexual and psychological abuse, at the hands of both staff and older students. 

Sue Caribou is one woman who was snatched from her home in 1972 and forced into an Indian residential school. She was seven years old. 

She recalls being thrown into a cold shower every night, "sometimes after being raped". She was forced to eat rotten vegetables and called a "dog" during her years there, and now in her 50s, still suffers from related health conditions. 

There are accounts of parents who camped out in front of schools, desperate to see their children inside. Many priests and nuns believed any interaction between children and their parents would undo the work of assimilation.

Fred Gordon was another child who was taken from his parents while playing with two kids in the front yard of his home. 

His aunt, Evelyn, was killed by nuns at a residential school in 1936. She was 11 years old. 

At the same school, Gordon was routinely sexually abused by a nun. He was left deaf in one year and blind in his left eye because of the abuse perpetrated against him. 

He is one of many who says he "wasn't surprised" by the discovery of 215 dead bodies in Kamloops. 

Harvey McLeod attended The Kamloops Indian Residential School in 1966, and told CNN, "I was a person that didn't want to live anymore, it changed me". 

Suffering physical and sexual abuse, McLeod compares the trauma he experienced to a prisoner of war. 

Looking back, he remembers discussions that "... this may have happened, that [his classmates] may have passed".

At the same time, he held on to the hope that they had run away. He felt happy for them. Maybe, he reasoned, they managed to escape. 

A long-sought apology. 

For McLeod and so many living survivors, the discovery last year confirmed their greatest fear.

Canada has since promised millions of dollars to help Indigenous communities search for unmarked graves.

On Tuesday, Pope Francis offered a long-sought apology to the Indigenous community over the church's role in the abuse they suffered at the schools. 

Speaking near the site of a former school, he called for a "serious investigation" of the schools and more assistance to help survivors and descendants heal.

"With shame and unambiguously, I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples," Francis told Indigenous leaders from the First Nations, Metis and Inuit people.

The 85-year-old Pope is making the week-long apology tour of Canada to fulfill a promise he made to Indigenous delegations that visited him this year at the Vatican, where he made the initial apology.

"I ask forgiveness, in particular, for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools."

If this post brings up any issues for you, you can contact Bravehearts (an organisation providing support to victims of child abuse) here.

If this post brought up any issues for you, you can contact the PartnerSPEAK website and peer support forum here. Contact the PartnerSPEAK Peerline: 1300 590 589 (Please check website for hours). All peer support is offered by fully trained individuals with the lived experience of having an intimate partner or close family member involved in child sexual abuse material.

This article was originally published on June 1, 2021 and was updated on July 26, 2022.

- With AAP.

Feature Image: Getty/Mamamia.