Adele D. Oliver


Community Manager, Lotusland, Canada

Every Child Matters

a Vancouver memorial - one of many throughout the country - to remember and honour all the First Nations children who were taken from their families to Residential Schools and for the many children who died and were found buried .... a great tragedy !!!
Please enlarge !

Since the early 1990s, unmarked gravesites containing the remains of hundreds of people, believed to be mainly Indigenous children, have been identified near the former sites of several Canadian Indian residential schools. The Canadian Indian Residential Schools were a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. Directed and funded by the Department of Indian Affairs, and administered mainly by Christian churches, the residential school system removed and isolated Indigenous children from the influence of their own native culture and religion in order to forcefully assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture.
The number of school-related deaths, mostly from tuberculosis, remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 6,000.Most of the recorded student deaths at residential schools took place before the 1950s. Bodies, graves, and potential sites have been identified across Canada, mainly using ground-penetrating radar. To date, the sites of unmarked graves are estimated to hold the remains of more than 1,800 previously unaccounted individuals, mostly children. However, across the entire residential school system, the number of identifiable children who are documented as having died while in their custody is over 4,100 individuals. (thank you, Wikipedia)

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