A First Nation — one of the many groups of Indigenous people — in Canada announced the discovery of 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former Indian residential school in the province of Saskatchewan, The New York Times reported. The announcement in late June 2021 came a few weeks after another similar discovery in British Columbia of the unmarked graves of 215 children in the grounds of another former boarding school.
In their statement, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations that represents 74 First Nations in Saskatchewan described the discovery as "horrific and shocking," and "the most significantly substantial to date in Canada." The Cowessess First Nation Tribe found the graves at the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential School.
The residential schools were part of a system that took Indigenous children from their families over the course of more than a century between 1883 until their closing in the late 1990s. The goal of these schools was to forcibly assimilate these children, by preventing them from speaking their own languages and keeping them away from their tribes. Many of the children were never returned home, and died under often unknown circumstances. Stories of disease outbreaks, sexual, emotional, and physical abuse were rife in these schools.
According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up by the government of Canada in 2008, which investigated the schools, at least 150,000 Indigenous children passed through the system, which was described by some as "cultural genocide." Today, Canada has 1.7 million Indigenous citizens.
In a virtual news conference in late June 2021, Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme clarified that these were unmarked graves and not a mass grave site. He added that some of the graves discovered may be of people who attended the church or were from nearby towns.
The recently discovered graveyard at the Marieval school was reportedly operating long after the school shut down. Archaeologists and Indigenous leaders predict there will be more such finds as the federal and provincial governments, as well as private companies are helping in the search for gravesites. The federal government has announced it would provide $3.9 million to Saskatchewan's Indigenous groups to aid in their search for more graves.
On June 30, 2021, the Lower Kootenay Band, a First Nations group in British Columbia, announced that they had found 182 human remains in unmarked graves near another former residential school. In a press release they said they believed the unmarked graves were those of people from the bands of the Ktunaxa nation, which includes the Lower Kootenay Band, aq'am and other First Nation communities. The graves were reportedly first discovered last year, by the aq'am community, which used ground penetrating radar technology.
"The Lower Kootenay Band is still in the very early stages of receiving information from the reports of the finding, but will provide updates as time progresses," the band said.
In the years since the announcement, numerous groups have called the claimed discovery of 215 unmarked graves in British Columbia into question. While there is consensus in Canada that numerous children died in poor conditions in the residential schools, many right-wing Canadians question the existence of the unmarked graves in Kamloops, particularly as no actual exhumations have taken place to date.
The indigenous communities, meanwhile, have grappled with the dilemma of whether to leave the sites undisturbed as memorial grounds or exhume whatever remains are extant and return them to communities.
Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation said in a New York Times report from 2024 that before exhuming the graves in British Columbia, they were doing everything they could to determine whether they had found unmarked graves or anomalies.
The Canadian government and Pope Francis have both apologized for the gruesome treatment of indigenous people and the abuse suffered by indigenous children at these residential schools.
Update 6/29/2021: Added statement from Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme.
Update 6/30/2021: Added news about remains found in British Columbia.