New Delhi: The picture of dresses draped in the cross at the Canada site where remains of over 200 children were found just last year has won the 2022 World Press Photo of the Year Award.
The image was captured by Canadian photojournalist Amber Jacken and she’s the fifth female World Press Photo of the Year winner.
Presenting the global winners of the #WPPh2022 Contest:
- ‘Kamloops Residential School’ by @photobracken
- ‘Saving Forests with Fire’ by @mattabbottphoto
- ‘Amazonian Dystopia’ by Lalo de Almeida
- ‘Blood is a Seed’ by Isadora Romero
Discover their work: https://t.co/KfNB2zECVa pic.twitter.com/mPRvlb3EXS— World Press Photo (@WorldPressPhoto) April 7, 2022
The picture is a tribute to over 215 children who died in Canada’s Kamloops in 2021.
Last year, the world along with Canada was taken by shock after the remains of at least 215 children, some as young as three-years-old, were found at a burial site at a former residential school set up to bring together indigenous people.
The children were students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia which closed in 1978.
These residential schools in Canada were compulsory boarding schools, which were run by the government and religious authorities during the 19th and 20th Centuries to forcibly assimilate indigenous youth.
Kamloops Indian Residential School was the largest of these sorts and was opened under the Roman Catholic administration in 1890. The school had as many as 500 students when enrolment peaked in the 1950s.
At the time of the discovery, Canada mourned the death of the innocent kids and paid tribute to them by hanging kids’ clothing, especially red dresses on the cross at those sites.
