(Edmonton) An Aboriginal community in northern Alberta reports the possible discovery of 169 unmarked graves near a former federal residential school.
Posted at 4:08 p.m.
Updated at 6:34 p.m.
“Our little warriors waited for us to find them; now we’re going to make sure they rest in peace,” Chief Sydney Halcrow of the Kapawe’no First Nation community said in an emotional press conference on Tuesday. Finding one grave is already too much, but finding several is incomprehensible, said the chief.
The alleged graves were discovered using ground-penetrating radar and a drone at the site of the former Grouard Catholic Mission, about 370 kilometers northwest of Edmonton.
Kisha Supernant, project leader and director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Lands Archeology at the University of Alberta, said the find corroborated what survivors and elders had already told, and marked the beginning of a long journey to find answers. ” There is still a lot to do […] to bring these children home,” she said.
The researchers focused on a small plot of land around the Grouard mission boarding school, also called Saint-Bernard. They indicate that 54 potential graves have been located around the church, a former residence of nuns and a former root cellar; Another 115 have been identified in the mission’s community cemetery.
Mme Supernant said the parish provided burial records showing that children who died while living at the boarding school were buried in unmarked graves. Some of the names provided by the Church were included in a registry of missing children created by the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation.
Mostly small Metis
Anthropologist Supernant, who is Métis, said family members are in the records of those who died at residential school. “Each of these children was a beloved member of a family and no one has been held responsible for their deaths,” she said.
The boarding school was opened by the Catholic Church in 1894 and operated until 1961. It had a large Métis population.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission heard testimonies from survivors of this residential school about severe sexual and physical abuse, forced labor and disease transmission. The Commission, which collected survivor stories and released a final report in 2015, documented reports of 10 student deaths at the boarding school.
Survivor Frank Tomkins said boarding school staff once forced a boy who couldn’t control his bowels to eat his own feces.
Survivor Rita Evans attended this boarding school for four years. She told the commission that there was a lot of religious education and hard work, but little classroom instruction. “We were always praying and learning nothing, and when I got out of 6and year, my God, I didn’t know anything, you know, other than work, work, ”testified Mme Evans.
Approximately 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children attended federal residential schools, often operated by religious communities. The commission documented at least 4,100 deaths.
Two other potential sites
Kapawe’no First Nation plans to continue its search for children who never came home to two other sites. Based on the testimony of survivors, the focus will be on the nearby Anglican Church and a place where federal officials and the North West Mounted Police, ancestor of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, were quartered.
Arthur Noskey, grand chief of ‘Treaty 8’, which covers the Kapawe’no community, said that whenever potential graves are located, “it’s like that wound can’t heal.”
“When you think it will get better, the wound reopens again,” but healing will not come without answers, he added. And it’s important for the world to see that these institutions were not schools, he said. “I hope that the children we found can now rest knowing that we found them. »
The “Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program” provides a crisis line for former residential school students and their loved ones who may be suffering from trauma caused by the memory of past abuse. The number is 1-866-925-4419.