The Marieval Indian Residential School operated from 1899 to 1997 in the area where the Cowessess Indians are located today in southeastern Saskatchewan.

The school was one of more than 130 compulsory boarding schools run by the Canadian government and religious authorities during the 19th and 20th centuries. They were part of the policy of integrating Indigenous children into Canadian society, a move that also destroyed Indigenous cultures and languages.

An estimated 6,000 children died while attending these schools, largely due to poor sanitation. Students were often housed in poorly constructed, poorly heated and unsanitary premises.

Physical and sexual abuse by school authorities has led many people to flee schools.

“They made us believe we had no soul,” Florence Sparvier, a former boarding school student, said at a news conference Thursday. “They demeaned us as people, so we learned not to like who we were.”

Last month, the Cowessess community began using ground penetrating radar to locate unmarked graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School cemetery in Saskatchewan.

Cowessess residents described the discovery as “horrifying and shocking”.

Perry Bellegarde, national chief of an assembly of indigenous peoples in Canada, called the discovery of the graves “tragic but not surprising.” “I urge all Canadians to support Indigenous peoples during this extremely difficult time,” he wrote on Twitter.

Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were removed from their families and placed in these schools.

Children were often not allowed to speak their native language or practice their culture, and many were abused and mistreated.

A commission launched in 2008 to document the impacts of this system found that a large number of indigenous children never returned to their home communities.

In 2008, the Canadian government formally apologized for the system.

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