New macabre discovery in a former college for native children and adolescents run by priests in Canada, another piece of what is becoming a scandal increasingly difficult to ignore for the American Catholic Church and also per the Pope, who at the beginning of June had expressed “pain” and “closeness” to the Canadian community. Near the Marieval Indian Residential School, in the west of the country, hundreds of anonymous graves have been found, where the institute’s “guests” suffering from disease or other were probably buried. In total, there are 761 bodies, most of which are children.
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The scandal could soon spread to the United States, whose secretary of the interior recently announced the opening of an investigation into the troubled legacy of Native American boarding schools, with particular attention to cemeteries or potential burial sites, to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences ”of these institutions, which over the decades have forced hundreds of thousands of children to leave their families and communities of origin.
The announcement of the new “horrifying and shocking discovery of hundreds of nameless graves” in Canada was made by the Cowessess community. The former school in Marieval, in eastern Saskatchewan, remained active for 98 years, until 1997. Excavations began in May, soon after. the discovery of the remains of 215 children near what was once the Kamloops Indian Residential School, one of the institutions of the so-called “Indian residential schools” system, a network of schools founded by the government and administered by the Catholic Churches which forcibly removed indigenous children from their communities to assimilate them into the dominant “white” culture.
“The number of unnamed graves will be the most significant to date in Canada,” the Federation of Indigenous Sovereign Nations (FSIN) said in a statement referring to the former school of Marieval.
“The Pope’s apologies would help the survivors begin the journey of reconciliation,” he said in a ‘interview with the Courier the executive director of the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, Stephanie Scott, said the death toll could be over 6,000.
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Following the discovery of Kamloops’ human remains, excavations have begun in several former residential schools in the country with the assistance of government authorities. They were colleges run by the government and religious authorities, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the aim of assimilating indigenous youth at all costs. Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their homes, almost always by force, and placed in residential schools, where they were forbidden to speak the language or practice the culture of their communities.
A commission set up in 2008 to document the impact of this system found that large numbers of indigenous children never returned to their communities of origin. The Truth and Reconciliation report, published in 2015, stated that this policy amounted to “cultural genocide”.
In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized. The leaders of the Catholic Church no. In 2018, the Canadian Bishops’ Conference, in a letter to the natives, explained that Pope Francis believed he “could not respond personally” to the request made by them, but encouraged the local bishops to continue the path of reconciliation and solidarity with indigenous communities.
The Missing Children Project documents the burial places of children who died while attending school. To date, more than 4,100 children have been identified who died while attending a residential school.
On the other hand, 50% of the complaints made to the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation concerned serious forms of physical and sexual abuse. Repeated cases of rape, which in most cases led to the psychological destruction of the victim and then had a very long-term impact: inability to establish interpersonal relationships, psychosis, alcoholism, unemployment, inability to be good parents.
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On June 5, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asked the Catholic Church to “take responsibility” for its role in the abuses committed in boarding schools for native children. The next day, Pope Francis said he “followed with pain the news coming from Canada”. Then he added: “We entrust to the Lord the souls of all deceased children in residential schools in Canada and pray for Canadian indigenous families and communities in pain. We pray in silence ». For his part, in recent days the bishop of Montreal, Monsignor Christian Le’pine, published a letter of apology, on behalf of the Catholic Church, speaking of “a dark side of Canadian history with respect to which no man, woman, believer or no, it can rightly remain indifferent ».
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The peoples of the American First Nations still await a formal apology from the Catholic Church.
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June 24, 2021 (change June 24, 2021 | 17:24)
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