If you think there’s another Kamloops

The Toronto Star says there are more mass graves.

“If you think there’s another Kamloops just coming around the corner, there is one — trust me,” says Lyle Keewatin Richards, the child of a residential school survivor who is part of a group trying to preserve an unmarked cemetery near the former Red Deer Industrial School in Alberta.

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, approximately 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended these residential schools. Estimates vary, but the commission put it at just over 4,000 dead, which would mean that more than one in 50 children who went to the schools died there. Most experts say the toll is likely higher.

It was a rate of death driven by far higher levels of malnutrition, disease and abuse than the norm at the time in white schools, experts say.

Many schools refused to send the dead children back to their families because it cost money; instead they dropped them into mass graves. Much cheaper.

Read on.

H/t Your Name’s not Bruce?

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