The tragedy of lost children has never ended for Canada's Indigenous tribes. From the latter part of the 19th century until the 1970s, indigenous parents had their children taken to school, sometimes by force, and never return.
At least 160 of the "undocumented and unmarked" graves announced on Monday were from the Penelakut Tribe in British Columbia, the others from neighboring tribes that also had children sent to the Kuper Island Residential School. It was on one of BC's Southern Gulf Islands.
"We are at another point in time where we must face the trauma because of these acts of genocide. Each time we do, it is possible to heal a little more," the Penelakut Tribe said in a statement, which was posted by the neighboring Cowichan Tribes's Facebook page.
The Kuper Island school was called Canada's Alcatraz, according to survivors. Some students did indeed try to get away by water, desperate to escape the abuse at the school, which included physical and sexual abuse and neglect. When parents asked after a child who was no longer at the school, they were told that the child had run away.
Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created to investigate abuses of indigenous groups, has reported that more than 4,000 indigenous children in residential schools died either from neglect or abuse. All over the country, projects to find these buried children are underway, using ground-penetrating radar and other methods to find long-abandoned graves.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/13/americas/canada-unmarked-indigenous-graves/index.html
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