Good morning. It’s Wendy Cox today.
It’s been two years since Indigenous leaders announced the discovery of 215 suspected unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Afterwards, Indigenous groups across Canada announced the results of ground-penetrating radar searches that indicated hundreds and hundreds more anomalies that suggest the possibility of unmarked graves.
What happens next has been another painful decision for communities to make: To exhume the remains or to leave them at rest, along with the lingering questions of who may be buried there and why, has been incredibly fraught. Last year, Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir, chief of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, said her community would be taking its time to make a decision.
But this week a Manitoba First Nation has announced it is preparing to excavate a church basement where it detected 14 possible burials last summer. To the knowledge of Kimberly Murray, the federally appointed Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves, it’s the first time a group has gone forward with digging.
“Everyone will be watching,” she said.
Reporter Patrick White spoke to Minegoziibe Anishinabe Chief Derek Nepinak about the decision. Chief Nepinak said it was a difficult one for his community, but he said a majority of former residential schools students, and their families, demanded closer examination of long-standing stories about burials beneath the Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Church.
Located about 320 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, Minegoziibe Anishinabe began searching the grounds of the former Pine Creek Residential School shortly after Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced the discovery of 200 possible graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in May 2021.
Last summer, a search party using ground-penetrating radar discovered 71 subterranean “anomalies” consistent with the presence of burials around the Pine Creek grounds. Many of the suspected graves were located within known burial grounds, but 14 of them lay beneath Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Roman Catholic Church, prompting the community to call in the RCMP.
The RCMP said last week that investigators have “not uncovered evidence at this time related to criminal activity specific to reflections detected at the site.” But the Mounties say they have a plan in place should the community-led dig uncover human remains.
The excavation phase began on Monday with a 3-D mapping of the entire site, said Chief Nepinak. He said archaeologists from the University of Brandon are scheduled to begin the delicate work of scraping away layers of earth from the basement’s dirt floor by the end of the week. The dig could take upwards of four weeks. A sacred fire will burn throughout the process.
Chief Nepinak told Patrick the location of the 14 anomalies helped the community reach a consensus on digging.
“It’s possible that someone was trying to hide something,” he said. “It suggests sinister intent. I think people want to focus on that.”
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.