The graves were never a secret: Why so many residential school cemeteries remain unmarked

Share this Story: The graves were never a secret: Why so many residential school cemeteries remain unmarked

The graves were never a secret: Why so many residential school cemeteries remain unmarked Indian Affairs refused to ship home children's bodies because of the cost; it follows that most were buried on or near school grounds Photo by Saskg/Wikimedia Commons

Article content This week has yielded a near-unprecedented tide of national horror at news out of Kamloops that a ground radar survey has uncovered evidence of up to 215 unmarked graves of children who died while attending the Kamloops Indian Residential School. While Canadians have used such words as “shock” or “disbelief” to describe the discovery of up to 215 unmarked graves of children who died while attending the Kamloops Indian Residential School, the truth is much more telling: It was never a secret that the sites of Indian Residential Schools abounded with the graves of dead children. Communities and survivors knew the bodies were there, as did any investigation or government commission that bothered to ask. We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or The graves were never a secret: Why so many residential school cemeteries remain unmarked Back to video If Canadians are only now discovering the deadly legacy of Indian Residential Schools, it’s not due to any lack of available evidence. This week, a myriad of Indigenous voices all mourned the Kamloops, B.C., discovery, but added that it isn’t unexpected or unusual. “It is a great open secret that our children lie on the properties of the former schools,” said Sol Mamakwa, an Indigenous member of the Ontario legislature. Jocelyn Formsma, executive director of the National Association of Friendship Centres, said in a statement that the Kamloops discovery is “a shock to us all, but unfortunately, not a surprise to many.”

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Article content It’s painful to hear that 215 bodies were found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. While it is not new to find graves at former Residential Schools in 🇨🇦, it’s always crushing to have that chapter’s wounds exposed.

Let us not forget them. https://t.co/g6lZ6ISewv — Perry Bellegarde (@perrybellegarde) May 28, 2021 From the earliest days of the Indian Residential School system, the federal government openly acknowledged high rates of student mortality. An official 1907 report into Manitoba Indian Residential Schools even included charts cataloguing pupils as either “good,” “sick” or “dead.” There was never an official policy on how to handle the dead from Indian Residential Schools, but because the Department of Indian Affairs refused to ship home the bodies of children for cost reasons, it follows that most were buried on or near school grounds. This was confirmed by the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, released in 2015. “Many, if not most, of the several thousand children who died in residential schools are likely to be buried in unmarked and untended graves,” it wrote. “Subjected to institutionalized child neglect in life, they have been dishonoured in death.”

Article content Photo by Chris Schwarz When schools closed, cemeteries were occasionally maintained as active burial grounds by neighbouring communities. The official cemetery of the Moose Factory First Nation, for instance, was initially established to bury the nearly 30 students who died at the Bishop Horden School between 1919 and 1956. Given the remote location of most residential schools, more often after closure the cemeteries became overgrown and whatever meagre grave markers were there quickly rotted away or were destroyed by prairie fires. In some instances, the Department of Indian Affairs even leased cemetery sites for commercial and agricultural use. In 1963, after the City of Brandon, Man., built a large recreational park atop one of the cemeteries of the former Brandon Industrial School, it took a sustained letter-writing campaign from one of the school’s former students, Alfred Kirkness, to have even a rudimentary fence erected around the site.

Article content “It saddened my heart to think the White Society would keep right on tramping over these graves, when they were told of the cemetery, and its location,” Kirkness wrote in 1964 after an initial round of letters was ignored. Photo by Library and Archives Canada The cemetery of the Regina Indian Industrial School, containing at least 40 confirmed graves, was similarly sold off to private owners following the school’s closure. Only after its rediscovery in 2014 was it designated a provincial heritage site and turned over to a non-profit for restoration. Over the years, cemetery locations have been independently confirmed by churches, archaeological students or, as happened in Kamloops, by the actions of local First Nations themselves. The cemetery of the Battleford Industrial School in Saskatchewan, containing 72 graves, was excavated in 1974 by a team from the University of Saskatchewan. The St. Eugene Mission Residential School, just outside Cranbrook, B.C., preserved student graves as part of the development of the St. Eugene Golf Resort & Casino, which is operated by the Ktunaxa Nation.

Article content Photo by Photo by Val Fortney Efforts are often marred by spotty information or official apathy, but pushback has also come from survivors themselves. In 2008, Michael Cachagee, head of the National Residential School Survivors Society, openly criticized efforts to assemble a national catalogue of Indian Residential School cemeteries, saying it risked becoming an “exercise in genealogy.” “If the Missing Children project is just a research exercise, then they’re losing it,” said Cachagee. Photo by Photo by John Lucas/Edmonton Journal Documenting the history of Indian Residential Schools is marred by poor recordkeeping (as well as the widespread destruction of many key records in the 1930s and 1940s), and nowhere is this more prominent than in the location of school cemeteries. “Sometimes virtually no cemetery information is readily available within the archival records, but knowledge of the existence and location of cemeteries is locally held,” wrote the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission recommended a “national strategy for the documentation, maintenance, commemoration and protection of residential school cemeteries.” An initial working group formed to examine residential school deaths was denied a funding request of $1.5 million by the then-government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, although in 2019 the federal government put $33.8 million toward an online registry of residential school cemeteries. • Email: [email protected] | Twitter: TristinHopper

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