Terms like residential school are deeply inadequate. These were not schools; they were prisons and forced labour camps

We’d all heard the stories, long before they started to receive this summer’s 24/7 coverage by every news station in Canada. Long before ground-penetrating radars confirmed the presence of unmarked graves, we knew that our missing family members did not simply “disappear” nor attempt and fail to run away from residential schools, despite what we were told by missionaries and government officials. Indigenous communities are necessarily close-knit, and we live in the histories of our people despite every effort at the eradication of our knowledges, cultures, languages – and of our lives.

Published in 2015, the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report of Canada (TRC) estimated that 4,100 named and unnamed students died in Canada’s residential schools. To keep costs low, the report said, many were likely buried in untended and unmarked graves at school cemeteries, rather than sending the students’ bodies back to their home communities. Often, parents were not notified at all, or the children were said to have died from sickness – an excuse commonly used to justify intentional genocides of Indigenous nations, predicated on our supposed biological inferiority.

Erica Violet Lee is nêhiyaw from Saskatoon and a member of Thunderchild First Nation. She is a poet, scholar, and community organizer

This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.