For decades, survivors of Canada’s residential schools have shared horrific stories about supposed mass graves filled with the remains of the indigenous children that had been separated from their families. Many didn’t believe the stories simply because the idea was too awful to consider. Sadly, they’re not just stories anymore.
Using ground-penetrating radar, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation discovered the remains of 215 children buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site in southern British Columbia. Some of the children were as young as three years old.
According to Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 chief Rosanne Casimir, the deaths are undocumented based on the information they have. However, the First Nation is working with the British Columbia Coroners Service and reaching out to the community in an attempt to find some records of the students and their deaths.
The Kamloops Indian Residential School operated from 1890 to 1978, first run by the Catholic Church and then the Canadian federal government for its last decade. According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, the school would have housed up to 500 students. The NCTR was founded in 2008 to investigate the history of the nation’s residential schools. At the time, they were told that 50 deaths had occurred at Kamloops.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, said that they’ve been having ongoing issues obtaining historical records, including those held by the Catholic Church.
“There may be reasons why they wouldn’t record the deaths properly and that they weren’t treated with dignity and respect because that was the whole purpose of the residential school … to take total control of Indian children, to remove their culture, identity and connection to their family,” she told CBC’s Early Edition.
The residential schools were rife with physical abuse, including sexual abuse, according to the limited documentation available, which raises alarming questions about the nature of these deaths.
Significant amounts of Indigenous children were removed from their families and forced to go to these schools, only never to return home. When this happened, explanations to the parents would be purposefully vague, or the school would claim that the child had run away and vanished. If the school did acknowledge the death, the body was rarely returned to the family.
Between the 1830s and 1997, when the last residential school closed, an estimated 150,000 children attended these institutions. Current data collected by the NCTR suggests that at least 4,100 children died at the schools, but the actual number is believed to be significantly higher. Murray Sinclair, who led the commission, believes the number to be over 10,000.
The commission called on the pope to apologize over the church’s role in the affair, and while Pope Francis acknowledged the discovery, there was no formal apology.
The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Perry Bellegarde, hopes that the discovery at the former Kamloops school leads to more investigations, citing the 130 residential schools that existed across Canada at one point in time.
“We have to use this as this catalyst,” Bellegarde said. “We’ve helped build this great country … We have to work together, so let’s roll up our sleeves and get this work done.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called for flags to be flown at half-mast, a gesture to mourn the 215 children. Since taking office in 2015, Trudeau has been implementing 84 actions designed to commemorate the students lost in residential schools as well as generally improve the lives of Indigenous people across Canada.
Despite this, Indigenous leaders feel that the Canadian government still has plenty to do towards reforming its treatment of Indigenous people. In 2019, the government allocated 27 million dollars to the search for mass graves, but the money was never distributed.
For former students and others affected by the discovery, a 24-hour National Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up at 1-866-925-4419. For those living in British Columbia, there’s also a First Nations and Indigenous-specific crisis hotline that can be reached at 1-800-588-8717.
Like what we have to say? Sign up to subscribe to email alerts and you’ll never miss a post.
