The discovery of more than a thousand graves of Native American children in Canada buried unidentified near boarding schools often run by Catholics shows the whole world the logical result of the brutal policy of assimilation imposed on the American Indians. Is it enough that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau looks "sad" Or for Pope Francesco to express “pain”?

Does that heal the wounds of the bereaved?

With this introduction, the Swiss newspaper Le Temps began an editorial on the recent Canadian revelations that showed the "unimaginable atrocities".

The newspaper pointed out that the United States wants to shed light on the abuses committed in the boarding schools of Native Americans, noting that Europe and Switzerland should also remember their atrocities.

The editorial stated that hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal children in Canada and the United States were taken from their families between 1819 and the 1990s, forcibly placed in boarding schools, prevented from practicing their traditions and were punished for speaking their language, in what the newspaper called a cultural genocide that makes them ashamed of their origins.

And the newspaper considered that talking about the topic of Native Americans today means opening the terrifying box of wonders, because of the humiliation, abuse and sexual abuse it contains.

Not all of the buried children died as a result of ill-treatment, of course - as the newspaper says - but many of them died of diseases, but they were buried in the utmost degree of ambiguity, indifference and silence and without the knowledge of their families, which kept counting them as "missing" forever, and what is worse is that children are sometimes Who were digging the graves of their comrades.

Perhaps the Canadian disclosure bears a positive feature despite being horrific - according to the newspaper - because it declassified these bad deeds that Native Americans denounced for decades and ignored by public opinion, and because the United States decided in light of that to initiate its own self-examination, which should extend beyond from North America, because European missionaries ran such boarding schools.

More than a formal apology from the Church and generous compensation, the newspaper called for detailed investigations into the extent of the tragedy and to unearth this dark chapter of history, seeing in it a necessary evil, to heal the scars of the trauma that many Native Americans today bear. It is a heavy legacy that partly explains the problems of poverty, high rates of suicide, violence, and alcohol and drug abuse.