The remains of 215 children were found buried at the site of a former boarding school in Canada, built more than a century ago to integrate indigenous people into mainstream society, according to a local Amerindian community.. An expert discovered the human remains last weekend using a georadar at the site where the boarding school was located, near Kamloops, in the western province of British Columbia, the Tk'emlups te Secwepemc aboriginal community announced in a statement from press.

“Some were as young as three years old,” Rosanne Casimir, head of the community, said of the children.. According to her, her death, the cause and date of which are unknown, was never registered by the boarding school management, although her disappearance had already been mentioned in the past by members of that community.. The preliminary results of the investigation are expected to be published in a report in June, Casimir said.

In the meantime, the community is working with the medical examiner and the museums of the province to try to shed light on the find and find any documentation related to the deaths.. “It breaks my heart,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted.. “It is a sad reminder of this dark and unfortunate chapter in our history.. My thoughts are with all those affected by this heartbreaking news,” wrote the president, who has made reconciliation with Canada's first peoples one of his priorities since taking office in 2015.

The former boarding school, run by the Catholic Church on behalf of the Canadian government, was one of 139 such institutions created in the country in the late 19th century.. It was inaugurated in 1890 and had 500 students in the 1950s. It closed its doors in 1969. Some 150,000 Amerindian, mixed-race and Inuit children were forcibly recruited into these schools, where they were taken from their families, their language and their culture.

Many were subjected to ill-treatment or sexual abuse, and at least 3,200 died, mostly from tuberculosis, according to the findings of a national commission of inquiry.. That commission heard testimony from several Native Americans who said the poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence and high suicide rates that still plague many of their communities are largely the legacy of the residential school system.

In 1910, the headmaster of the Kamloops institution complained that the Canadian government did not provide enough funding to “adequately feed the students,” according to the community statement. Ottawa formally apologized to the survivors of the residential schools in 2008 as part of a C$1.9 billion (€1.3 billion) settlement. The latter were the victims of a “cultural genocide,” the national commission of inquiry concluded in 2015.

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