Indigenous Canadians search for more graves across the country after new discovery Reuters

Author: Anna Mailer Papuni

Toronto (Reuters)-Hundreds of unmarked graves were found on the site of a former boarding school in Canada for the second time this week, which provides a new impetus for the search for more Aboriginal remains nationwide because of the land Restrictions on rights, incomplete records, and disagreements on how to do it to commemorate the dead.

For 165 years, as recently as 1996, Canadian boarding schools forcibly separated Aboriginal children from their families, causing them to be malnourished and subjected to physical and sexual abuse. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it “cultural genocide” in 2015.

On Thursday, Saskatchewan’s Cowessess First Nation announced that it had found 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian site at Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia. Approximately 751 unmarked graves were found next to the Indian boarding school. boarding school.

These two findings have prompted indigenous communities to search for more buried children across Canada. This task is not without obstacles. In some cases, private land ownership precludes searches. Some communities are still waiting for church groups to provide them with records that will allow them to identify the remains. Some relatives want to be dismembered, while others do not.

The injuries caused by boarding schools have reverberated in survivors and their families and current government practices. For example, the foster care system separates indigenous children from their families disproportionately, usually due to insufficient funding for services in their home communities.

Finding these remains can give the family a sense of closure.

‘They are planning to die’

Jennifer Latre knew where her great aunt Olivia and Uncle David were buried. It is believed that they were 13 and 7 years old when they died at Brandon Boarding School in Manitoba.

Ratley said they were in an unmarked grave below the camp, which was one of Brandon’s multiple locations, which may contain the remains of more than 100 children who died in school.

Latre hopes that the city government will buy back this property and protect the land so that “the vacation family will not camp on the graves of my ancestors.”

She said she is also skeptical about the researchers’ efforts to conduct DNA testing on the remains, because some families may not want to do that.

Eldon Wonghorn, founding chairman of Simon Fraser University’s Indigenous Studies and who participated in the search for Brandon’s boarding school, said that although some families may want on-site commemorations, “you must also consider repatriation. This is the only way. That is through DNA mining and identification.”

Yellowhorn remember to check the architectural drawings of the boarding school and see the space reserved for the cemetery.

“They are planning to die.”

The Kamloops discovery triggered a wave of funding pledges from multiple provinces to assist the search. The federal government has vowed to expedite the release of the 27 million Canadian dollars ($22 million) promised in 2019.

Assemblyman Cynthia Desjarlais said that for Muskowekwan First Nation in Saskatchewan, bones began to appear in 1993 when First Nation tried to replace the water pipes in the house behind the boarding school.

She said that it wasn’t until 2018 that they found 35 graves in a ground sonar search in collaboration with two universities, and they had enough resources to conduct a proper search in the area. “Now we need to do other areas because we expect more.”

Tony Brunette, based in Winnipeg, specializes in ground penetrating radar for business structure scanning, and he said he has received a call asking about unmarked graves.

Last year, Long Plain First Nation conducted some ground penetration work at the Portage Boarding School in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba.

“There are many families who are reaching out and they want to know where their relatives are,” Chief Dennis Mitches said.

The 1,200-person Tseshaht community on Vancouver Island near the western edge of Canada wanted to investigate the location of the Alberni boarding school on its land.

Every day, Tseshaht elected chief councillor Ken Watts gets calls from residential school survivors about where children went missing, where they might be. Watts said that their government funding proposal is ready.

“Honestly, this is a lot of work. It’s not easy,” he said. “It’s not just about hiring some companies to run machines on the territory. We think there needs to be a ceremony. We have a cultural agreement.”

Boarding school survivors can call the National Indian Boarding School Crisis Hotline 1-866-925-4419 to get immediate support 24 hours a day.