Residential Schools

215 Children Found

A ground-penetrating radar located the remains of 215 indigenous children on the weekend of the 30th. These children attended Kamloops Indian Residential School. The Catholic church had recorded them missing not dead. The Catholic Church was aware of the mass grave.

What The Schools Were Like

Residential schools were a horrible and evil place for their students. In these schools children were forced to cut their hair, forced to wear inadequate clothing, and were denied the right to speak their native language. The schools had a poor education that many students could not understand. The students were instead taught skills like how to do laundry or farming. In the schools many children were mentally abused, assaulted physically and sexually. They were punished in inhuman ways. The living conditions of the schools were overcrowded, had poor sanitation, had severely inadequate food and health care.

Intergenerational Trauma

Residential schools greatly traumatized their survivors, the abuse and neglect they experienced greatly affects their life to this day. However, that trauma can and has been passed down to future generations. The trauma that they experienced was sometimes modelled by their children, which passed down the trauma. Furthermore, residential school survivors did not have family figures to look up too, it was that much harder for them to raise their own family. Intergenerational trauma has also been found to be able to pass down generations through genes, making it impossible for a parent to stop the trauma from passing to their family. With intergenerational trauma, the cycle of trauma just continues on to the next generation, then to the next, and then the next. Making it very hard to break the cycle that residential schools have caused.