2021 Canadian Indian residential school gravesite discoveries

The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous children directed and funded by the government of Canada through the Department of Indian Affairs. Canada is a settler society which established residential schools aimed at assimilating Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. The schools were administered by various Christian churches from 1828 to 1997. Students' bodies were often buried in school cemeteries to keep costs as low as possible. Comparatively few cemeteries associated with residential schools are explicitly referenced in surviving documents, but the age and duration of the schools suggests that most had a cemetery associated with them. Many cemeteries were unregistered, and as such the locations of many burial sites and names of residential school children have been lost. Over 4,000 students died while attending Canadian residential schools. Remains have been found on some school grounds. In 1974, the cemetery of the Battleford Industrial School was excavated, revealing 72 bodies. Bodies have also been unearthed accidentally during construction (e.g.: 19 at Muscowequan Indian Residential School in 1992) and by flooding (e.g.: 34 at Dunbow Industrial School in 1996). Starting in 2018, many First Nations communities began using ground-penetrating radar and cadaver dogs to search for potential graves. Announcemen

Monument data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).