Shock swept across the country as many Canadians learned that the remains of an estimated 215 children were found at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
For Indigenous people, the tragic discovery didn’t come as a surprise thousands of Indigenous children never came home from residential schools and their whereabouts remain unknown.
As a settler researcher who studies how we acknowledge the past and build ties between communities, what I find surprising is that many of us continue to be shocked.
Tip of the iceberg
We may never know the true figures.
“The violence of residential schools is like a slice across the spectrum of the Indigenous–settler relationship,” writes transitional justice scholar Rosemary Nagy. By taking children from their families, and in the physical and psychological abuses carried out there, residential schools were an integral aspect of broader policies that enacted violences and harms many of which