More remains discovered in Canada

The remains of as many as 751 people, mainly indigenous children, have been discovered at the site of a former school in the province of Saskatchewan, a Canadian indigenous group said on Thursday.

The discovery comes weeks after the remains of 215 children were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of another former boarding school in British Columbia.

The discovery in Saskatchewan was made by the Cowessess First Nation at the Marieval Indian Residential School, about 160 kilometers east of the provincial capital, Regina. The school was operated from 1899 to 1997. It was run by the Roman Catholic Church until the Cowessess First Nation took over in 1981.

The Cowessess began radar scanning of the school grounds and the surrounding area on June 1, days after the discovery of the remains of 215 indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at what was once Canada's largest indigenous residential schools near Kamloops, a city in British Columbia.

"This was a crime against humanity, an assault on a First Nation people," Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, the provincial federation of indigenous groups, said during a news conference on Thursday. "The only crime we ever committed as children was being born indigenous," he said.

In Canada, the Constitution recognizes three Aboriginal groups: Indians (known as First Nations), Inuit and Metis, all with distinct cultures.

"There will be hundreds more unmarked graves and burial sites located across our First Nations lands at the sites of former Indian residential schools," Cameron said. "There are thousands of families across our treaty territories that have been waiting for their children to come home."

According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), a body mandated to tell Canadians about the truth of residential schools, more than 150,000 First Nations children were required to attend state-funded Christian schools as part of a program to assimilate them into Canadian society from the 19th century until the 1970s.

They were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused without any contact with their parents, and thousands are said to have died, which the TRC called "cultural genocide".

Some former students at the schools have described the bodies of infants born to girls impregnated by priests and monks being incinerated.

The commission estimated that about 4,100 children went missing nationwide from the schools. But an indigenous former judge who led the commission, Murray Sinclair, said that he now believed the number was "well beyond 10,000".

The Ottawa government apologized in 2008 and admitted that physical and sexual abuse in the schools was "rampant". Indigenous leaders have said that the legacy of abuse and isolation is the "root cause" of epidemic rates of alcoholism and drug addiction on reservations.

Canada's largest First Nations territory has issued an open letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asking the federal government to help it search the grounds of the former residential schools for unmarked graves.

More than a dozen lawyers from across Canada have requested the International Criminal Court investigate the government and the Vatican for crimes against humanity.

The United Nations Human Rights Office has called on Canada to launch "exhaustive investigations" and "redouble efforts" to find missing indigenous children from residential schools across Canada.

Beijing on Friday urged the Canadian government to take forceful measures to check facts, trace accountability and implement compensation and policies to protect the rights and interests of its indigenous peoples.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian cited statistics as saying that indigenous people in Canada were 58 percent more likely to be attacked and the probability of being murdered and going missing of indigenous women in Canada was 16 times higher than that of white people.

Thousands of indigenous women were murdered or went missing from 1980 to 2015, therefore the Canadian government has to admit that the miserable treatment of and violence against indigenous women constitutes "genocide", the spokesman said.

Faced with such historical crimes, the Canadian government has said for years that it would take action to find the truth, but it only pays lip service to this and few measures are implemented, he said.

Zhao Jia in Beijing contributed to the story