Burning more churches in Aboriginal lands in Canada

A police official said, “Investigations are underway into the two previous fires, and these two new ones, and there are no arrests or charges.”

This comes after hundreds of unidentified graves were discovered at the sites of former boarding schools in Canada.

The government funded these compulsory schools, which were run by Christian clergy, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the aim of “assimilating indigenous youth and integrating them into society.”

Indigenous peoples demanded more searches in other sites to find similar graves.

In an interview with CBS, the indigenous leader of the Similkamen Valley said that he received the news of the fire in Chewbacca Church, via a phone call in the early hours of Saturday morning, and when he arrived at the site half an hour later, it had completely collapsed.

“I am angry, and I do not see anything positive that will result from this behavior, but it will be difficult,” he added.

He pointed out that many indigenous people follow the Catholic Church, and are saddened by the fires.

Last month, the First Nation Group (Tikamlops Shuswab) announced that a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children had been found in a boarding school set up by British colonialists to bring together the indigenous Indian population and change their identity.

These schools in Canada were compulsory boarding schools run by government and religious authorities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the aim of controlling indigenous youth and forcibly changing their beliefs and ideas.

Indigenous children were studying at Kamloops Indian Residential School, a boarding school established in 1890 under the supervision of the Catholic administration, in the province of British Columbia, which was permanently closed in 1978.

The same group in Kosice said it had found 751 graves of unidentified people at a similar school in Saskatchewan. The Marival Indian Boarding School was also run by the Catholic Church.

Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were taken from their families and forcibly entered into these schools across Canada.

A committee was established in 2008 to document the effects of this system, and found that a large number of children who were admitted to these schools never returned to the communities from which they were taken from, and the report of the committee, which is a prominent landmark, said that what happened is a cultural massacre.

The Canadian government had previously apologized for this programme.