“They would just start beating you and lose control and hurl you against the wall, throw you on the floor, kick you, punch you.”

That is how Geraldine Bob, a survivor of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, described her experience at the facility in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC), where the remains of 215 Indigenous children were recently found in an unmarked grave.

Bob’s testimony was shared by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), which in 2015 determined that Canada had committed “cultural genocide” by forcing more than 150,000 Indigenous children to attend residential schools across the country between the 1870s and 1990s.

The system intended to assimilate Indigenous children into Canadian society and eliminate what state officials at the time described as an “Indian problem”; children were forcibly separated from their parents and siblings, beaten for speaking their Indigenous languages, and suffered rampant malnutrition, physical violence, forced labour and sexual abuse.

The discovery of the children’s remains in Canada’s westernmost province on Thursday has reopened persistent wounds for First Nations, Métis and Inuit, especially residential school survivors and their families. But Indigenous advocates said it is only the tip of the iceberg – and across the country, longstanding calls for government action are growing louder.

Indigenous families “had said for years and years that they knew that there were unmarked graves, that they knew that there were all of these children missing”, said Pamela Palmater, a professor and chair of Indigenous governance at Ryerson University in Toronto.

“This one unmarked grave, of the many that are out there, is exactly what genocide looks like in this country,” Palmater told Al Jazeera. “And until we get to the truth, until we bring all of these children home, until we stop engaging in the actions that lead to the deaths of Indigenous peoples, the genocide continues.”

Read the full article about residential schools by Jillian Kestler-D'Amours at Al Jazeera.