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OTTAWA – Last month’s announcement that the remains of 215 Aboriginal children had been found on the grounds of Kamloops Indian Residential School left the nation reeling.
Flags were placed across Canada on half-staff and improvised memorials consisting of children’s shoes or boots, often marked “215”, including one in front of the Canadian Parliament House in Ottawa.
“A lot of survivors, my relatives, have been saying this for years and years – that there’s been a lot of death, there are a lot of unmarked graves,” said Berry Pelegaard, National President of the First Nations Association. The country’s largest Aboriginal organization, referring to children who were taken from their families and forced to attend Canada’s notorious boarding schools like Kamloops to assimilate into Western culture.
“But nobody ever believed the survivors,” he added. “And now with the discovery of the grave site at Kamloops, it is horrific, it is tragic and painful.”
An estimated 150,000 Indigenous children passed through schools between their opening, circa 1883, and their closing in 1996. Since taking office in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has prioritized a list of 94 actions to commemorate students and improve lives for Aboriginal people. . But indigenous leaders believe the government still has a long way to go.
The discovery of the tombs gave new impetus to the debate about how to atone for its history of exploiting the indigenous population. Many wonder how many children could end up in this burial place.
What was discovered?
About 20 years ago, efforts to find remains began at Kamloops School, which operated from 1890 until the late 1970s and was once the largest school in Canada, with a student population of 500 at its peak. Members of Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation made a shocking discovery last month after bringing in ground-penetrating radar.
Of the 215 bodies found by radar, one appears to be a three-year-old who died, said Rosanne Casimir of Tk’emlups te Secwepemc. She said all the children were buried decades ago.
President Casimir also said she expects more remains to be discovered with more ground surveys this month. The community now works with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the British Columbia Medical Examiner’s Service.
On Friday, leader Casimir said that the bodies found so far appeared to be buried in “separate unmarked burial sites that are undocumented, to the best of our knowledge”.
What is the residential school system?
In the late nineteenth century, Canada allocated land to indigenous peoples through often questionable treaties, while seizing indigenous lands in some places, notably in British Columbia.
Around 1883, the government added a new dimension to its exploitation of the indigenous population. Aboriginal children in many parts of Canada were forced to attend boarding schools, often far from their communities. Most were run by churches, and all outlawed the use of indigenous languages and indigenous cultural practices, often through violence. Diseases and sexual, physical and emotional abuse spread.
Kamloops School was operated by the Roman Catholic Church until 1969, when the school system was taken over by the federal government. One inspector and a doctor reported that students in Kamloops sometimes suffered from severe malnutrition.
The Canadian government’s National Truth and Reconciliation Commission spent six years hearing 6,750 witnesses to document the schools’ history. In a report in 2015, he concluded that the regime was a form of “cultural genocide”.
The committee also called for an apology from the Pope for the role of the Roman Catholic Church. On Sunday, Pope Francis stopped making an official apology, but said the “sad discovery raises awareness of the pain and suffering of the past”.
Some former students testified before the commission that priests in schools had fathered children from Aboriginal students, that children were taken from their young mothers and killed, and that in some cases their bodies were thrown into ovens.
Many students also died due to illness, accidents, fires and during escape attempts, according to the authority.
Schools suffered mass deaths when infectious diseases swept over them, according to this year’s report on burial sites by Scott Hamilton, professor of anthropology at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
How many children died in boarding schools?
The commission found that when children died in boarding schools, their families were often given ambiguous explanations or told that they had ran away and simply disappeared. When schools acknowledged the deaths of children, they generally refused, until the 1960s, to return their bodies to their families. The remains were only returned if it was cheaper than burying them in schools.
In its report, the commission estimated that at least 4,100 students died or went missing from boarding schools, and demanded that the government account for all of these children. But she did not say for sure how many have disappeared.
Murray Sinclair, the judge and former senator who chaired the committee, said in an email last week that he now believes the number is “far above 10,000.”
Since the commission’s conclusion, a federal project has been implemented to document the fate of children who never return to their families after being sent to boarding schools, generally known as “missing children.”
Remains have appeared in unmarked graves or have been discovered through construction or natural events at other earlier school sites, although none on the Kamloops scale.
Dr. Keisha Supernan, an Aboriginal woman who directs the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archeology at the University of Alberta, led teams using ground-penetrating radar and other techniques to search for remains.
Professor Hamilton said that simply locating burial sites was often difficult due to poor record keeping, lost records, and relocation of some schools.
“Often these graves are now unmarked,” he said. “What they were 50 or 60 years ago is anyone’s guess. The challenge here is that it hasn’t been maintained. Once schools are closed, property is often abandoned.”
what happened after that?
During a private debate in the House of Commons last Tuesday night, Mr Trudeau said Canada had failed 215 children whose remains were discovered as well as other children who had never returned to their communities from boarding schools.
“Today, some of the children found in Kamloops, not yet found elsewhere around the country, were grandparents or great-grandparents,” he said. “They aren’t, and that’s Canada’s fault.”
Mr. Trudeau said the government has responded to Indigenous leaders’ pleas for money and other help to use radar and various technologies to search for remains of students at other schools. In 2019, the budget allocated C$27 million to search for graves. But the money was not distributed.
Leader Bellegaard said he hoped the shock following the discovery in Kamloops, Canada, would accelerate efforts to achieve reconciliation and eliminate discrimination and the wide economic gap between the indigenous population and the rest of the country.
“We have to use this as a catalyst,” he said. “He helped us build this great country and no one is going anywhere. We have to work together, so let’s roll up our sleeves and get this work done.”
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