More than 200 children found buried near Canadian residential school

The remains of more than 200 children have been found on the grounds of a Canadian residential school, where they were students, and are thought to be undocumented deaths.

“This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light — the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School,” Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc community said Thursday in a statement.

“We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths.”

The school had been the largest in the Indian Affairs residential school system, according to the statement, which noted that the children had been buried within the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc community, of which members have been notified and are “still grappling with the effects of residential school.”

The community plans to continue surveying the school grounds — expanding on work done in the early 2000s — in collaboration with the ground penetrating radar specialist and anticipates to have preliminary findings completed by mid-June.

The federal government in 1969 took over from the Roman Catholic administration — which opened the school in the late 1800s — and changed it from a school to a residence for local students until the establishment’s closure in 1978, the statement said, citing the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

A prominent number of Indigenous children were sent to residential schools and remain unaccounted for and are documented by The Missing Children Project, the statement noted.

“Sometimes people didn’t come back, we were happy for them, we thought they ran away, not knowing if they did or whatever happened to them,” Harvey McLeod, who was at the school for two years in the late 1960s, told CNN Friday.

McLeod, who said he endured abuse at the school, noted that he felt “so much hurt and pain to finally hear, for the outside world, to finally hear what we assumed what was happening there.”

Many Indigenous children were forcefully separated from their families and made to attend the schools, CNN reported, citing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 report, which outlined decades of abuse — physical, sexual, emotional — against children in institutions that were run by the government and church.

Adequate medical care was lacking at the school, according to the commission, which estimates the deaths of over 4,000 children at residential schools, according to CNN.

“We recognize the tragic, heartbreaking devastation that the Canadian residential school system has inflicted upon so many, and our thoughts are with all of those who are in mourning today,” Lisa Lapointe, chief coroner of the British Columbia Coroner’s Office, said in a statement.

“The true accounting of the missing students will hopefully bring some peace and closure to those lives lost and their home communities,” read the statement.