Leaders of Indigenous groups in Canada said on Thursday that investigators had found more than 600 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school for Indigenous children. The bodies were discovered at the Marieval Indian Residential School, which operated from 1899 to 1997, where the Cowessess First Nation is now located, about 85 miles (135 kilometers) east of Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan. 

Last month the remains of 215 children, some as young as 3 years old, were found buried on the site of what was once Canada's largest Indigenous residential school near Kamloops, British Columbia. From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian schools, the majority of them run by Roman Catholic missionary congregations, in a campaign to assimilate them into Canadian society.