The Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan says it has found hundreds of unmarked burial sites near a former residential school.
According to a media advisory released on Wednesday, the Cowessess First Nation completed a radar scan of the area surrounding the Marieval Indian Residential School, making a "horrific and shocking discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves."
"The number of unmarked graves will be the most significantly substantial to date in Canada," the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) said in the advisory.
The Cowessess First Nation is expected to make an official announcement and provide more details on the discovery Thursday (today) morning.
The news comes after the remains of 215 children were discovered at former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. last month.
Niigaan James Sinclair, an Anishinaabe writer and associate professor at the University of Manitoba, says the new discovery of unmarked graves in Saskatchewan confirm stories told in the community for decades.
"The federal government was invited by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 to investigate sites at residential schools and they refuse to do so at that point. This is just a long time coming in which communities have been seeking to find out where their children are," Sinclair told CTV News Channel on Wednesday.
Sinclair said the trauma of Canada’s residential school system is something First Nations communities continue to deal with.
"Every Indigenous community in this country has a story of lost children, has a story of children who went to the schools and never came home," he said.
With 146 residential schools across Canada, Sinclair said the finding is not surprising to Indigenous people, and there are likely more undiscovered burial sites.
"It's a story that I think Canadians are surprised about because they are not prepared for what has been the truth of this country, which is that this is the kind of abuses that were perpetrated against Indigenous people -- my people -- for over a century and a half in these places," Sinclair said.
According to the University of Regina, the Marieval residential school operated from 1899 to 1997 in the Qu'Appelle Valley. Marieval was run by the Roman Catholic Church until Cowessess First Nation took over its operations in 1981.
The residential school was later demolished in 1999 and replaced with a day school.
The Cowessess First Nation, located 164 kilometres east of Regina, began radar scanning of the school grounds and surrounding area on June 1 in an effort to identify and memorialize victims of the institution.