
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.
And then, last Thursday 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.
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