Ottawa announces that Kimberly Murray will serve as an independent special interlocutor in the delicate file of the unmarked graves around the federal residential schools for Aboriginals.
Former Executive Director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Ms. Murray will work with Indigenous communities to make recommendations aimed at strengthening laws and practices related to this issue, in order to protect and preserve the burial sites found on the former residential school sites.
The government promised to create the post last year after radar detected what appear to be hundreds of unmarked graves in the ground at former residential school sites in British Columbia and Saskatchewan.
Other unmarked burial sites were subsequently discovered and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Marc Miller said they should be just the “tip of the iceberg”.
Ottawa said Wednesday that as a special interlocutor, Ms. Murray will engage with governments, representative organizations, communities, survivors and families of Indigenous people “about the identification, preservation and the protection of graves and unmarked graves, including the possible repatriation of remains”.
It will submit an interim report in one year, then a final report in two years.
Kimberly R. Murray is a member of the Kanesatake Mohawk First Nation, north of Montreal. She is the senior leader of the new Six Nations of the Grand River Survivors Secretariat, where she seeks to shed light on missing children and unmarked graves at the Mohawk Institute.
Before taking on this role, Ms. Murray had become in 2015 the first-ever Deputy Attorney General of the Aboriginal Justice Division in Ontario.
Kúkpi7 Rosanne Casimir, of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc community, who attended the announcement in Ottawa on Wednesday alongside Chief Cadmus Delorme of the Cowessess First Nation, says the speaker’s mandate confirms the respect that must between Aboriginal communities and the federal government.
Ms. Murray said she was ready to discuss the challenges communities faced in their tireless efforts to recover, protect and memorialize those buried near former residential schools, including how to dismantle colonial laws.