Steph Deschamps / June 25, 2021
The Cowessess First Nation in the province of Saskatchewan and the Canadian Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) did not provide specific numbers, according to CBC and Global News. But the discovery is confirmed at the Marieval Indian Residential School in that province and is the largest number of graves found in Canada to date.
The school site is 140 kilometers east of the city of Regina, not far from the U.S. border. The school remained open from 1899 to 1997, and the First Nation took control of the cemetery from the Catholic school in the 1970s, according to CBC.
This new discovery comes a few weeks after the discovery of the remains of 215 children near a former residential school run by the Catholic Church in Kamloops, in the western Canadian province of British Columbia.
Some 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were forcibly conscripted into 139 residential schools across the country until the 1990s, where they were cut off from their families, language and culture.
Many of them were subjected to mistreatment or sexual abuse, and more than 4,000 died, according to a commission of inquiry that concluded that Canada had committed cultural genocide.