I’ll keep this brief.

The bodies of 215 children, some as young as 3 years old, were recently discovered in unmarked graves at a former B.C. residential school site.

This most recent discovery is part of a much larger and inexcusable pattern of deaths, by disease or “accidents” in Canadian Residential Schools. The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society reports that they have identified over 4,100 cases of children who died while forced into these so- called “Indian” Residential Schools.

This charming piece of Canadiana is a brutal piece of the Colonial vs. Indigenous history that has been ignored, something that should be appalling to us all.

Please take a moment to sign this call for government to declare a national day of mourning for indigenous children whose families lost them first to Residential School, and then to death due to the abysmal treatment they endured at these institutions.

Government also needs to take the initiative to conduct ground-penetrating radar searches of all former Residential School sites so that the actual number of those lost is accurate and fully acknowledged.

Government continues to ignore Indigenous issues in more ways than this. Nothing is done about the Highway of Tears, which begins at my city. As of 2021, 33 First Nations communities lack access to clean water. These things are inexcusable.

We, as Canadians need to acknowledge the horrific wrong done to these children, and honour their memories, officially, as a country. We need to allow the indigenous population to grieve these children, and we need to grieve them as well as the fellow Canadians they should have been treated as. This is an act of reconciliation that cannot be ignored.