Canada has been rightly shaken by the recent discovery of the bodies of 215 children at the site of a Residential School in Kamloops BC. For more than a century, the children of indigenous Canadians were forcibly separated from their parents and families to be educated at boarding schools with a view to their assimilation to the ruling culture and their being torn apart from their native language and culture. As is his wont, Pr Kurt Reinhardt of Trinity Lutheran Church, Kurtzville ON, has transposed the anguish arising from the discovery of the earthly remains of these wronged children into Heaven-directed verse.

Their Stolen Children Have Been Found

Their stolen children have been found,
We hid them in unhallowed ground.
Their cries rise up to heaven’s skies,
Against the hatred and the lies,
That tore them from their loving arms,
Exposing them to untold harms.

Refrain:
For the lost children weep,
Who in the ground now sleep,
That we their lesson reap,
Their mem’ry sacred keep.

Their hearts with grief are overcome.
This horror has struck us all dumb.
We can but hang our heads in shame,
At what was done in Heaven’s name.
The God of love most surely wept,
When His compassion in us slept.

What we stole we cannot repay.
We must confess it all and say,
That in the true North strong and free,
We will all strive from sea to sea,
To not forget our nation’s wrong,
Lest we its evils still prolong.

Kurt E. Reinhardt

Dedicated to the 215 Indigenous children buried beside the former Residential School in Kamloops BC.