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. 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 school.

As of April 2025, no bodies have been exhumed from the suspected gravesites, largely due to a lack of community consensus on whether to investigate detected anomalies at the risk of disturbing burials. As of January 2024, at least three official excavations had been performed with no bodies discovered, though at least one excavation only investigated a portion of the reported ground anomalies at that site. 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. Federal Justice Minister David Lametti said in 2023 that he was open to outlawing residential school denialism. His successor, Arif Virani, has not taken a position on the issue.

The Government of Canada formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008. The commission's findings included recognition of past colonial genocide and settlement agreements. In October 2022, the House of Commons of Canada unanimously passed a motion calling on the federal Canadian government to recognize the residential school system as genocide. This acknowledgment was followed by a visit by Pope Francis, who apologized for Church members' roles in the genocide. Beginning in June 2021, there was a series of arsons and other acts of vandalism against Christian churches that law enforcement, politicians, and tribal officials speculated was spurred by anger towards Christians over the schools and gravesites.