The leaders of the indigenous groups of Canada said on Saturday that investigators have found 751 unmarked graves on the site of a former boarding school for indigenous children. Recently 215 graves were found at another site.
The bodies were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School, which operated from 1899 to 1997 where the Cowessess First Nation is now located, about 85 miles east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.
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“This is a crime against humanity, an attack on the Indigenous people,” said Bobby Cameron, chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous First Nations in Saskatchewan. He also said that he hopes to have more digging to find it on the site of the boarding schools in Canada.
After the discovery, an apology was sought from Pope Francis. He spoke about the pain and asked the religious and political authorities to unfold curtains but did not apologize.
From the 19th century up to the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools, which were made by Roman Catholic missionary religious institutions, as part of a campaign to assimilate them into Canadian society. The students were abused commonly and were beaten for speaking their native language, Canadian authorities said.