One week after twin fires destroyed two century-old Catholic churches on Indigenous land in southern British Columbia, two more fires – at St Ann’s Church and the Chopaka Church that began within an hour of each other – burned to the ground early Saturday morning.
According to CBC Canada, Lower Similkameen Indian Band Chief Keith Crow says he received a call at about 4 a.m. PT Saturday that the Chopaka church was on fire.
By the time he reached the church, it was completely engulfed in flames. Crow said he later received a call from the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, near Hedley, that St. Ann’s Church on that reserve had burned down as well.
“I’m angry,” Crow said. “I don’t see anything positive coming from this and it’s going to be tough.”
RCMP officers said both buildings were completely destroyed, and they were treating the fires as “suspicious.” Last week, Penticton South Okanagan RCMP spokesman Sgt. Jason Bayda said the two fires early Monday were being treated as suspicious, according to Digital Journal.
Cheif Crow says the fires are not a coincidence, particularly seeing as the latest fires came on the heels of the two fires last week. “There’s got to be something more to it,” he said. “It’s not just coincidence.”
The burning of the Catholic churches comes about after investigators found more than 600 unmarked graves at the site of an Indigenous boarding school last week—a discovery that follows last month’s report of 215 bodies found at another school.
Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in compulsory residential boarding schools in Canada. Many of the children died due to the squalid health conditions inside.
In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was launched to document the impact of the Indigenous boarding school system.
In its final report, issued in 2015, the commission found that large numbers of indigenous children had never returned to their home communities. The commission’s landmark report said the practice had amounted to cultural genocide.
