Shoes placed outside the Ontario Legislative Building in memory of the 215 children whose remains were found at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, B.C.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
For years, Indigenous people have been trying to get Canadians to grasp the magnitude of the atrocity that was the residential school system.
They fought for compensation from Ottawa, which created and ran the schools for more than 100 years, and won it in 2006. They sought and were given a formal apology in 2008, in which former prime minister Stephen Harper said “the Government of Canada now recognizes that it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes … and to separate children from rich and vibrant cultures and traditions.”
And, thanks to the multiyear Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings and the report that came out of them in 2015, Indigenous people told their stories of the sexual, mental and physical abuse they suffered in the schools – most of which were run by the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United churches – and of the deplorable living conditions in so many of the 138 residential schools that operated at one time or another across Canada.
And yet as powerful as all this was, nothing has ever pierced the consciousness of Canadians quite as sharply as the discoveries in May and June of what are believed to be close to 1,000 unmarked graves, some of which are believed to contain remains of unidentified children consigned to two former residential schools.
Do Catholic leaders truly feel they don’t owe Indigenous people an apology?
In both cases, the remains were found using ground-penetrating radar. Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan says it has identified 751 unmarked graves in an abandoned cemetery at the former Marieval Indian Residential School. In British Columbia, a preliminary search has found the remains of what are believed to be 215 children near the site of a former residential school in Kamloops.
The news has struck a nerve in Canada, and struck it hard. In a recent Ipsos poll, four out of five respondents said they were shocked by the Kamloops discovery, and 62 per cent said they were more aware of the history of residential schools as a result.
They should gird themselves for more, as these two discoveries are likely only the beginning.
Thanks to poor diets, unsanitary living conditions and the prevalence of tuberculosis, the annual death rate for residential schools students between 1920 and 1950 was often as much as four to five times as high as the death rate among children in the general population, according to the TRC report. Yet year after year, for decades, Indigenous children were taken from their parents and forced into these prison-like institutions.
The report found that 3,200 named and unnamed children died in residential schools, or within a year of leaving one. The TRC’s estimate has since risen to 4,100, and is expected to keep climbing.
But of the 3,200 deaths in the original TRC report, no name was given in 32 per cent of them. In 23 per cent of the deaths, school administrators didn’t even bother recording whether a child who had died in their care was a boy or a girl.
In most cases, the children’s bodies were not sent to their families, often because the government refused to bear the cost. Some were given proper burials at the schools; many were consigned to unmarked graves in formal or informal cemeteries, a large number of which at the time of the TRC report were “abandoned, disused and vulnerable to accidental disturbance.”
This was the final insult added to the grievous injury of the residential schools. But now, thanks to the way the news of the unmarked graves has raised the public’s awareness of the schools, it can provide the needed momentum for Canada to address the greatest stain on its history, in a way that goes beyond financial compensation and apologies, and which demonstrates that it can face its past with the maturity and confidence of a great nation.
Ottawa should spend whatever is required to help Indigenous groups find and identify as many of their lost children as possible, and to protect the places where they are buried. It should release any relevant records, as should the churches. And it should provide public space for residential school victims to be commemorated.
It is heartbreaking and yet remarkable that these children, erased by the state, are the Indigenous voices that have finally broken through Canadians’ ambivalence about residential schools. Their silent dignity, in the face of countless indignities, cannot be ignored. Give them back their names.
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