Science and Medicine

Canadian Indian residential school gravesites

The Canadian Indian residential school system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous children directed and funded by the government of Canada through the Department of Indian Affairs. Canada is a settler society which established residential schools aimed at assimilating Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. The schools were administered by various Christian churches from 1828 to 1997. Students' bodies were often buried in school cemeteries to keep costs as low as possible. Comparatively few cemeteries associated with residential schools are explicitly referenced in surviving documents, but the age and duration of the schools suggests that most had a cemetery associated with them. Many cemeteries were unregistered, and as such the locations of many burial sites and names of residential school children have been lost. Over 4,000 students died while attending Canadian residential schools. Remains have been found on some school grounds. In 1974, the cemetery of the Battleford Industrial School was excavated, revealing 72 bodies. Bodies have also been unearthed accidentally during construction (e.g.: 19 at Muscowequan Indian Residential School in 1992) and by flooding (e.g.: 34 at Dunbow Industrial School in 1996). Starting in 2018, many First Nations communities began using ground-penetrating radar and cadaver dogs to search for potential graves. Announcement of 215 anomalies at Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021 made international news and became symbolic of the larger search for children who went missing and died at residential schools. Most communities have not yet followed these searches with excavations due to a lack of community consensus on whether to disturb burials. As of December 2025, only St. Joseph's Residential School in Fort Resolution has found remains based on radar and dog information. Partial excavations at three other schools have not found remains. Disputes regarding the conclusiveness of the evidence has helped spawn a movement of denialism about the existence of some or all residential school burial sites. Indigenous groups and academics have dismissed claims of a "mass grave hoax", saying that claimed discoveries of mass graves were present in a minority of stories published by mainstream media and that there had been public misinterpretation of what had actually been announced in 2021.

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See also

• ▸Dancing plague of 1518
• ▸Ash glaze
• ▸Inguinal hernia surgery

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