Who Will Place A Name On The Unmarked Graves Of North America’s Indigenous Children?

For the 'cultural genocide', spanning more than a century on the native people, the Canadian government has started to cough up compensation.

In what is officially called the country's largest settlement against forceful assimilation, Canada Jan. 4 announced a $31.5 billion agreement to compensate indigenous families who suffered because of the residential school system and to improve the child welfare system of the nation as indigenous children make up for more than half of those in foster care in Canada, according to a 2016 census.

A major part of the compensation would go to the families, which filed lawsuits against the Canadian government. The amount to be paid to each individual will be decided in consultation with the country's largest Indigenous organization, the Assembly of First Nations.

The government was sulking to compensate the indigenous families over the residential school system which it had admitted as discriminatory. Last year, it had filed an appeal seeking to overturn a landmark decision awarding compensation to indigenous children.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged to take "concrete action" to help find the hidden graves of indigenous students. But the Catholic prime minister is finding it difficult to have his away as he relies on a set of laws that date back to the 19th century to govern more than 1.67 million indigenous people in the country who make up nearly 5 percent of the country's 38 million population.

Canada's indigenous schools are blots on the "good intentions" of government and churches which tried to help native people in North America to solve problems such as disease, hunger, loss of traditional economy during the colonial era and in modern times.

The most sinister element of children's cemetery revelations is that the graves were hidden, secret and there was not one headstone or cross marking them despite the schools were run under the watch of two established and resourceful European churches - Roman Catholic and the Anglican, whose reactions have been reduced to mere apologies so far.

Why their deaths were not properly recorded and their burial shrouded in mystery?

From 1831 to 1996, at least 150,000 indigenous children were taken away from their homes and placed into one of 139 residential schools.

At least 6,000 students died, though their number could be higher, who were housed in crowded, church-run boarding schools, where they were abused and banned from speaking their languages as part of cultural assimilation which was used as a ploy to undermine the native American resistance to dispossession.

The "mainstreaming" of the native population required systematic denigration of their local cultures and languages, which was undertaken with seemingly benevolent "civilizing" education.

The children, buried secretly en masse, could have died of the Spanish Flu, measles, or worse, could have been killed at the hands of their protectors, according to the findings by Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2008-2019), which probed the Indian residential school system. Some of the survivors said that the bodies of infants born to girls impregnated by priests were also dumped in the graves.

The cause/s is hard to ascertain, but what is clear is that they did not receive proper medication and humane burial, and their families were not tipped off of their illness and the subsequent death.

After gathering more than 7,000 statements from indigenous people, the state-appointed commission concluded that this government assimilation policy was a "cultural genocide."

Among the biggest findings are the remains of as many as 751 people found in Saskatchewan, which borders the United States to the south, and a mass grave of 215 children unearthed in unmarked graves in a former church-run school for indigenous students in British Columbia in western Canada, in May last year.

The discovery of secret mass graves in Canada is a tip of an iceberg in North America where hundreds of thousands of indigenous children were culturally assimilated during the colonial era and in modern times.

Though a group of Canadian lawyers moved the International Criminal Court (ICC) in June last year, no one is held accountable so far.

The Hague-based court can open a preliminary examination on a proprio motu (one's own initiative) to locate the unmarked graves of indigenous students in the continent.

That will amount to giving a decent burial to indigenous children sacrificed in the name of cultural mainstreaming as it can help identify a name for each unmarked grave.