“Every child matters” has become a rallying cry, adorning banners, orange shirts, decals and memorials to the Indigenous children who died at or went missing from Indian Residential Schools and similar institutions.

Indigenous communities have used these words to recognize the thousands of Indigenous children who were taken, never to return.

Despite this truth being something communities knew for decades, it took the use of scientific methods to locate potential unmarked graves of children buried near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School to garner the attention of non-Indigenous people, both in Canada and globally.

On May 27, 2021, Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc announced that they had located 215 potential unmarked graves of children — that number reverberated around the world.

In the first rush of media coverage and public outrage, governments were quick to commit millions of dollars worth of funding for communities to undertake searches around the sites of former Indian Residential Schools.

Memorials of stuffed animals and children’s shoes began to appear. The Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast for months. Orange Shirt Day was transformed into an official National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. And First Nations communities across the country made public statements about their searches.

The numbers from Kamloops were originally reported as 215 and later revised to 200, then the numbers began to climb as more unmarked graves were found at the former Marieval Indian Residential School, Kuper Island Residential School and many more. But inaccurate numbers also surfaced on social media — first 6,000, 10,000, then 12,000 and it didn’t take long for people to try and downplay the numbers and cast doubt on the results.

Read more - https://theconversation.com/every-child-matters-one-year-after-the-unmarked-graves-of-215-indigenous-children-were-found-in-kamloops-183778