Lucas Crandall / Staff reporter

On October 28, 2006, a funeral was held for thousands of Bykivnians at a graveyard in Bykivnia, Ukrainian. It was estimated to have upwards of 100 000 bodies buried at the graveyard.

In Canada at a the site of a former residential school, upwards of 215 graves of Indigenous children were found on May 28th, 2021. After these children were found, a funeral was held 70 years after they died in May of 2021 to commemorate them.

During the 1920s to the 1940s, the Soviet government would bring the bodies of tortured and murdered political prisoners who they considered “enemies of the Soviet state” to a forest outside of Bykivnia where they would bury all of them in a grave estimated at about 15,000 square meters or 160 000 square feet. About 210 of these mass graves would be found by Polish and Ukrainian archaeologists until current day.

According to “‘Cultural genocide’: the shameful history of Canada’s residential schools – mapped” by Antonio Voice, Leyland Cecco and Chris Michael, Almost right after these bodies were brought into mass graves, indigenous children across the world would be put in residential school and treated poorly, often beaten or abused. Thousands of these children would die from disease, neglect or suicide.

These dead children’s graves would be found at Kamloops Indian Residential School, the largest residential school in Canada.

The article “Why Canada is mourning the deaths of hundreds of children” by Holly Honderich quotes Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation in an announcement they made. “Regrettably, we know that many more children are unaccounted for,” said Rosanne.

We can only wonder if our generation will learn from our ancestors.

Cites:

Why Canada is mourning the deaths of hundreds of children – BBC News

100,000 buried at Bykivnia recalled at Day of Remembrance (05/28/06)

‘Cultural genocide’: the shameful history of Canada’s residential schools – mapped | Indigenous child graves | The Guardian

Pictures:

Kyiv Bykivnia Central Monument

Canada’s Grim Legacy of Cultural Erasure, in Poignant School Photos

Government ordered to hand over documents about infamous residential school