The Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, announced on Thursday that at least 751 unmarked graves had been discovered on the grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School.
Chief Cadmus Delorme emphasized that the remains of what are believed to be both adults and children were not in a mass grave but in unmarked graves where the headstones had been removed by representatives of the Catholic Church.
According to the Archbishop of Regina, Don Bolen, a priest who was serving there entered into a conflict with the local First Nations chief in the 1960s and used a bulldozer to destroy the tombstones. But he said that the number was more than expected and “it points to the pain and suffering that were connected” with what he said was a moment in the past.
Yet although the residential schools have been closed, the racial discrimination targeting Indigenous peoples in Canada hasn’t stopped.
The news came the day after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau preened in front of the cameras defending his country’s human rights protection efforts in response to China’s call on the United Nations Human Rights Council to conduct a probe into the discovery of the remains of 215 children at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
This time, the Canadian leader shunned the cameras. Instead, he released a statement in which he said that the findings in Marieval and Kamloops are a “shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced – and continue to face – in this country”.
While saying that the government is committed to advancing reconciliation in concrete meaningful and lasting way and emphasizing the Canadian government will provide indigenous communities with funding and resources, Trudeau did not offer any details about investigation or accountability.
Given the scale of the findings in just two of the residential schools, the real death toll over more than a century will likely be far more than previously thought.
Ironically, none of Canada’s allies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, have commented on the horrible findings, not to mention appealing for an international investigation into them. Something Canada did in the UN Human Rights Council last week, demanding as spokesperson for the Western countries a probe into the so-called human rights issues in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, citing lies fabricated by the United States to smear China. Their collective silence about the horrors in Canada — presumably because they too have the blood of aboriginal people on their hands — speaks volumes of their hypocrisy.
What has been done cannot be undone. But Ottawa is obviously not in a position to lecture others on human rights.
The Canadian government is obliged to work together with the international community to support an impartial and thorough investigation into the crimes against humanity it has committed. Editorial, China Daily
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