The prize for the best press photo in the world went to an image showing dresses and crosses in memory of hundreds of children who died after being forcibly moved to residential schools in Canada.

The photo was taken by Canadian photographer Amber Bracken for The New York Times. It’s part of a series Bracken took to the Kamloop boarding school, where children from the country’s indigenous population were placed to be forcibly assimilated into the culture of the majority population.

– It’s the kind of image that sticks in your memory. It elicits a sort of sultry reaction, head of the jury Rena Effendi said Thursday.

– I can almost hear the silence in this photo, a quiet moment for global recognition of the history of colonialism, not only in Canada, but around the world, she says.

Last May, a large number of unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 children were discovered on the grounds of the former British Columbia boarding school in western Canada.

Since then, more than 1,000 unmarked graves have been discovered near former boarding schools run by religious groups. The results shed light on a dark chapter in Canadian history and the large-scale forced assimilation of the Indigenous population.

A total of 150,000 children from the country’s indigenous population were educated in 139 such schools from the late 19th century until the 1990s. They were separated from their families and cut off from the indigenous language and culture. . Many children have died due to poor conditions in schools.