Winnipeg Free Press - November 6, 2009

Long buried truths emerging

Unmarked graves of aboriginal people who died in government care a disgrace

By: Catherine Mitchell

Among the many euphemisms we have constructed to describe dying is the idea that in death we lose a loved one or a part of ourselves. It is an apt description of the pain that takes hold -- a life is "lost" to us.Imagine the anguish if it were literally true, if a loved one vanishes without a trace. There is no rite of passage, and no physical place to unload the sorrow.

So the anguish carries on.

In Canada, there are hundreds of graves, unmarked and overgrown, holding the remains of thousands of "lost" souls. The grave sites are the resting places of so many aboriginal people who died after being forcibly taken from their families by government policy, to residential schools for assimilation or to urban hospitals when disease overwhelmed rudimentary medical care in Canada's rural or remote areas.

Many, and perhaps most, of the burial sites are nearly obliterated by the passage of time and bereft of markers. They sit like pockmarks on Canada's conscience.

The story of the abuse, neglect and indignity inflicted by government policy is erupting finally into the national consciousness.

My colleague Jen Skerritt did a terrific job in Wednesday's paper documenting the pain of First Nations families who saw loved ones lifted out of their communities for treatment of tuberculosis in Manitoba sanitoriums.

I was struck by the similarities of that story to the tales I heard last spring from residents of the Eastern Arctic communities of Rankin Inlet and Arviat whose loved ones, killed in a Northern Manitoba plane crash in 1949, were buried in a mass, unmarked grave at the nearby Norway House reserve. The seven Inuit passengers, on their way to polio treatment in Winnipeg, were the only ones of the 20 Canadians aboard the plane whose bodies were not transported back to their home towns for burial. All others were non-aboriginal.

Canada was quick to assert its authority and responsibilty to "rescue" the sick, but its humanity had limits. In death, a body became an inconvenience.

How many died in government "care" remains to be documented -- the story yet untold from Canada's sorry history of inhumane treatment of indigenous people, a local historian told me. They were buried in fields adjoining schools, or municipal cemeteries. Most of those schools have been torn down and the plots forgotten and grown over.

One cemetery used by the United Church residential school in Brandon is in private hands now, part of a trailer park, a private researcher hired by the church told me.

Government policy deemed as unacceptable the expense of transporting bodies back to their families.

It has yet to be documented exactly how many children, for example, died while attending 145 residential schools across Canada (but mostly in the West) from the late 1800s until the late 1960s when most were closed.

Justice Murray Sinclair, in a recent address at the University of Winnipeg, gave a compelling description of how impotent the parents and community leaders were when their children were forced into Christian schools for assimilation starting in 1870s, long before education became compulsory in Canada. Parents had been stripped by federal law of the right to protest or resort to the court, noted Sinclair, now the chairman of the national Indian Residential School Truth and Reconciliation Commission. First Nations parents could be forbidden to visit their children, requiring a pass to leave the reserve from the very Indian agents that gathered and transported children to the schools.

When the kids died, they were buried by the schools without notice to the families left to wonder why they never came home.

But the dead often don't stay down and people are starting to ask questions. Skeletons are beginning to poke up through the soil of their ignominious resting grounds. Graves, forgotten and unrecorded, are being bulldozed for development and the truth is emerging. The protests and outrage, ever legitimate but today abundantly legal, of the people are being heard.

The clamour to find the graves, to identify the remains and repatriate them to their family lands is growing. I encourage all Canadians to join in the campaign for a reconciliation past due.

It will be tough because little care, not surprisingly, was paid to the details of burials, plots and cemeteries. Records, where they existed, were lost and the unmarked graves have been reclaimed by the elements. Forgotten, except by some loved ones who spent a lifetime wondering.

The search for the remains is part of the debt Canada owes to make amends for a history of institutionalized abuse against indigenous people, to set right the denial of basic decency to those often regarded as something less civilized.

Catherine Mitchell

John Duncan, Canada’s Minister of Indian Affairs, recently stated that cultural genocide was never attempted in Canada, my response:

In one of his so-called “Indian Poems”, white supremacist Duncan Campbell Scott , Deputy Minister of Canada’s Indian Affairs, wrote:

She stands full-throated and with careless pose,
This woman of a weird and waning race,
The tragic savage lurking in her face,
Where all her pagan passion burns and glows;
Her blood is mingled with her ancient foes,
And thrills with war and wildness in her veins;
Her rebel lips are dabbled with the stains
Of feuds and forays and her father’s woes.

And closer in the shawl about her breast,
The latest promise of her nation’s doom,
Paler than she her baby clings and lies,
The primal warrior gleaming from his eyes;
He sulks, and burdened with his infant gloom,
He draws his heavy brows and will not rest.

The Canadian Government’s denial that Cultural Genocide and out and out Genocide were never attempted by British colonial and Canadian governments in what is today Canada is ludicrous, preposterous, and delusional! The extinction of the Beothuk and three British proclamations for Maliseet and Mi’kmaq scalps, plus other horrors under British colonial rule that are too numerous to mention here, if not Genocidal attempts, what were they, warped insane attempts to assure survival? Then, under Canadian rule, malnutrition rations, minimal health care, Indian residential and Indian day schools that were set up specifically for taking the Indian out of the Indian, other government Indian Affairs policies that were also enacted for the express purpose of exterminating First Nation Cultures, etc., if these were not an all out attempt to commit Cultural Genocide what were they, more warped insane attempts to assure survival? As one who is old enough to remember the humiliation of being degraded by overt white supremacist racism in my youth, my advice for elected and non-elected Canadian Indian Affairs officials is to take your heads out of the sand and have a reality check! They could begin to acquire enlightenment by reading the following short story.

Prime Minister Harper’s Indian Residential School apology draws attention to Duncan Scott Campbell, the Deputy Minister in charge of Indian Affairs Branch from 1913 to 1932. Campbell described the residential school program as an attempt “to kill the Indian in the child.”

Mortality rates at the residential schools soared during Campbell’s reign. Many students contracted tuberculosis and were forced to sit through classes as their health deteriorated, ensuring that healthy students would be exposed to the virus.

Scott addressed the issue in 1924 in one of the most chilling statements in Canadian history. “It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habituating so closely in the residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this does not justify a change in the policy of this Department which is geared towards a final solution of our Indian Problem.”

About Duncan Campbell Scott

As the bureaucratic head of Indian Affairs Branch from 1913 to 1932, Duncan Campbell Scott had among his responsibilities the direction and management of Canada’s Indian residential school system.

The Encyclopedia Britannica reports that he “allowed school staff to use a variety of inhumane punishments to implement and enforce the assimilation of these children.”

Scott left a record of his thoughts during his 20 year command of the Department of Indian Affairs. His duplicitous writing reveals a carefully crafted policy of cultural genocide. It is chilling to realize that Campbell wrote the following policy statements in the 1920’s.

“The policy of the Dominion (of Canada) has always been to protect Indians, to guard the identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population.”

Reference: From a work of literary criticism produced as a Masters thesis by Nancy Chater at OISE in Toronto in 1999.

Library of Canada 0-612-45483-5

TECHNOLOGIES OF REMEMBRANCE:
LITERARY CRITICISM AND DUNCAN CAMPBELL SCOTT'S "INDIAN POEMS"
Nancy Chater: A thesis submitted in confomity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Department of
Curriculum, Teaching and Learning
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education
University of Toronto
Copyright by Nancy Chater, 1999

Chater pulled the quote from a book titled The Age of Light, Soup and Water: Moral Reform in English Canada 1885 - 1925 by . Valverde is a criminology prof at University of Toronto Mariana Valverde Also Wikipedia Mariana Valverde

Scott’s role as Canada’s top Indian Affairs bureaucrat enabled him to travel on Indian territory at tax payer expense and write pretentious lamentations about the people he was determined to destroy.

Thanks to Michael Jack Lawlor for his input.

Daniel N. Paul, November 26, 2011

On December 6, 2011, I received a memo from an Acadien Friend, Cyrille LeBlanc, commenting about the renaming of the Cornwallis school, and another issue, the Nova Scotia education Department’s past policy of forbidding the use of a person’s non-English mother tongue on the Province’s school grounds. It’s a most interesting comparison of the cultural abuses suffered by both Acadiens and First Nation’s children.

Daniel,

That's great regarding the (renaming of the Cornwallis School). I heard that on the news yesterday and thought of you.

On another issue. The sad story of the residential schools which is troubling. Acadian can relate to this story - minus the sexual abuse. That part was the domain of our Acadian priests. That didn't happen to me, but many of my age, including some close friends, were victims.

There were schools in Acadian villages of Richmond County and Yarmouth County where the Acadian Francophone students were punished for speaking French. Fifty one years ago this year the Pinkney's Point school in Yarmouth County was closed and the students (all Acadians) were sent to the Arcadia School in an Anglophone community. They were punished for speaking French on the school grounds. At recess time they would post a guard to be on the look out for teachers to tell their friends to stop speaking French.

Some Pinkney's Point parents stopped speaking French at home to their children so they would not get punished at school. The French language is now lost among the young of this Acadian community. Pinkney's Point was originally established by New England Planters who came to Yarmouth County to replace the Acadians who were deported. An Acadian Surette family from Wedgeport moved to Pinkney's Point. Gradually other Acadians moved in. The descendants of the Planters moved out.

Spinghaven, where most Acadians are Métis, in Yarmouth County there were a few Anglophones who ran things such as the school. At the Spinghaven School the Acadians were also punished for speaking French. Acadian families stopped speaking French in the home. However I don't know anyone who does not speak French.

In Richmond County catholic nuns of Scottish descent would punish Acadian Francophone students if they spoke French on the school grounds. Today most residents of Richmond County are of Acadian descent. But only a minority speak French and they live in the Petit-de-Grat area.

These issues are being discussed today because of the Electoral Boundaries Legislative Committee going around the province.

Cyrille LeBlanc, Wedgeport NS

At least 3,000 died in residential schools, research shows

Dormitories for aboriginal children in disgraced system were disease 'breeding grounds'

The Canadian Press

Posted: Feb 18, 2013 12:18 PM ET

Last Updated: Feb 18, 2013 12:32 PM ET

At least 3,000 children, including four under the age of 10 found huddled together in frozen embrace, are now known to have died while they were attending Canada's aboriginal residential schools, according to new unpublished research.

While deaths have long been documented as part of the disgraced residential school system, the findings are the result of the first systematic search of government, school and other records.

"These are actual confirmed numbers," Alex Maass, research manager with the Missing Children Project, told The Canadian Press from Vancouver.

"All of them have primary documentation that indicates that there's been a death, when it occurred, what the circumstances were."

The number could rise further as more documents — especially from government archives — come to light.

The largest single killer, by far, was disease.

'The schools were a particular breeding ground for [tuberculosis]. Dormitories were incubation wards.' Research manager Alex Maass

For decades starting in about 1910, tuberculosis was a consistent killer — in part because of widespread ignorance over how diseases were spread.

"The schools were a particular breeding ground for [tuberculosis]," Maass said. "Dormitories were incubation wards."

The Spanish flu epidemic in 1918-1919 also took a devastating toll on students — and in some cases staff. For example, in one grim three-month period, the disease killed 20 children at a residential school in Spanish, Ont., the records show.

While a statistical analysis has yet to be done, the records examined over the past few years also show children also died of malnutrition or accidents. Schools consistently burned down, killing students and staff. Drownings or exposure were another cause.

In all, about 150,000 First Nations children went through the church-run residential school system, which ran from the 1870s until the 1990s. In many cases, native kids were forced to attend under a deliberate federal policy of "civilizing" Aboriginal Peoples.

Many students were physically, mentally and sexually abused. Some committed suicide. Some died fleeing their schools.

One heart-breaking incident that drew rare media attention at the time involved the deaths of four boys — two aged 8 and two aged 9 — in early January 1937.

A Canadian Press report from Vanderhoof, B.C., describes how the four bodies were found frozen together in slush ice on Fraser Lake, barely a kilometre from home.

The "capless and lightly clad" boys had left an Indian school on the south end of the lake "apparently intent on trekking home to the Nautley Reserve," the article states.

A coroner's inquest later recommended "excessive corporal discipline" of students be "limited."

The records reveal the number of deaths only fell off dramatically after the 1950s, although some fatalities occurred into the 1970s.

"The question I ask myself is: Would I send my child to a private school where there were even a couple of deaths the previous year without looking at it a little bit more closely?" Maass said.

"One wouldn't expect any death rates in private residential schools."

In fact, Maass said, student deaths were so much part of the system, architectural plans for many schools included cemeteries that were laid out in advance of the building.

Maass, who has a background in archeology, said researchers had identified 50 burial sites as part of the project.

About 500 of the victims remain nameless. Documentation of their deaths was contained in Department of Indian Affairs year-end reports based on information from school principals.

The annual death reports were consistently done until 1917, when they abruptly stopped.

"It was obviously a policy not to report them," Maass said.

In the 1990s, thousands of victims sued the Canadian government and the churches that ran the 140 schools. A $1.9-billion settlement of the lawsuit in 2007 prompted an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The research — carried out under the auspices of the commission — has involved combing through more than one million government and other records, including nuns' journal entries. The longer-term goal is to make the information available at a national research centre.

“It is our history, our shaping of the new world,” Milloy writes. For white writers to treat residential schools as solely someone else’s story is to miss the chance to learn about ourselves, to live in a society better able “to deal justly with the Aboriginal people of this land.” We tried to erase hundreds of cultures across the land. To open ourselves to that history is to feel crippling guilt or daunting responsibility. Maybe that’s why we avoid it, or why we treat residential school as if it’s only in the past, ignoring its living legacy and the ongoing divide between Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal cultures.

That state of denial allows things to continue as they always have, with settler Canadians taking from Aboriginal peoples instead of living in partnership. I am writing this book in the hopes of better understanding the crimes European-Canadians committed and are committing against the First Nations of the Maritime region, and to push myself to be a better ally. As educator Paulo Freire one wrote, “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” The only way I can avoid participating in oppression is by participating in the struggle against it.

To do this, I need to move past learning and be a witness, telling others what I’ve learned. Despite all the media coverage, non-Aboriginal people still don’t know about residential schools. In 2008, the research firm Environics found only a third of Canadians were “familiar with the issue of native people and residential schools.” And only five percent said they were “very familiar” with these issues. More than a third had heard about physical and sexual abuse, but just twenty percent realized that children had been separated from their families, and only ten percent knew they weren’t allowed to speak their mother tongues.

“We still know very little” As Paulette Regan wrote, there is no Indian Problem. There never was. What we have here is a settler problem – a deep-seeded belief that one culture is better than the other. Only from the place of cultural arrogance can we proclaim solutions for other people’s problems – problems defined and created by the same arrogance. Too often we hear, and tolerate, criticisms of the Mi’kmaq for failing to “get with the times” or “stop whining about the past.” In other words, assimilate into our ways; forget your history, tradition, and culture. Give up who you are and become us instead. The inherent assumption is that we are better.

And yet, by the time Knockwood came along, Euro-Canadians saw the Mi’kmaq as an inferior people. A 1947 Bachelor of Education thesis for Mount Allison University called “Indian Education in Nova Scotia” begins: “Determining the relationship between the Indians and the whites became an immediate problem with which the latter, because of their superiority, were forced to contend.”

Early Europeans were amazed by the kindness Mi’kmaq showed children. They wrote much of their incredible freedom and egalitarianism. The explorers were perplexed that people lived more or less equally, with leaders taking on more power but also far more responsibility. The land was absent of dictators. Leaders seemed to have the genuine respect of their people. Yet there was complexity in their governance, which had three levels – local bands, district leadership and band council. Modern democratic systems were modeled after Indigenous systems.

CBC News · Posted: May 30, 2021

British Columbia, Canada

Indigenous leaders, experts call for protection of sites of former residential schools Social Sharing

Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said remains of 215 children were found at unmarked site in Kamloops, B.C.

About 100 people gathered Saturday night at the site of the former Kamloops residential school, where the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said the remains of 215 children were discovered last week. (Briar Stewart/CBC)

WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.

Indigenous leaders and experts in British Columbia are calling for the protection of sites of former residential schools after the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said the remains of 215 children were found at one such site in Kamloops, B.C.

They warn that this represents just a small portion of the thousands who died while the schools were in operation.

Linc Kesler, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia's Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, said it's only a matter of time before the same type of technology used by the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation reveals more physical evidence of the horrors of residential schools across Canada.

"It's absolutely not an isolated incident," Kesler said.

On Thursday, Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc said preliminary findings from a ground-penetrating radar survey uncovered the remains.

Work underway for forensic experts to identify, repatriate children's remains from B.C. residential school Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at the University of British Columbia, agreed that the residential school sites should be protected.

"We need to make sure they are controlled and protected so full investigations can be done," Turpel-Lafond said.

'We're all grieving'

B.C. Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee said he too would like the sites to be protected — but bureaucratic red tape has added layers of complication.

Teegee said Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc started the process of finding the remains 20 years ago.

He said it would take all levels of government to come together in order to remove barriers and provide the resources needed to identify and commemorate all the children who went missing while at residential schools.

"These children had a home. These children were loved by somebody," he said.

B.C. Assembly of First Nations Regional Chief Terry Teegee said the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation started the process of finding the remains 20 years ago. (Rafferty Baker/CBC)

More than 100 people gathered in front of a sacred fire at the site of the Kamloops residential school Saturday evening, standing shoulder to shoulder to grieve.

Marie Narcisse was part of the crowd on Saturday. She attended the school as a child, as did her parents.

"So many times the oral stories of this place and many other places were told and it seemed as though nobody believed anybody," she said.

Marie Narcisse, left, and her sister were among the crowd at the site of the Kamloops residential school on Saturday evening. (Briar Stewart/CBC)

On Sunday, Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir said there will be a debrief with the nation's membership this week, adding that other chiefs across Canada are having similar conversations with their communities as well.

"We're all grieving," Casimir said. "There's so many unanswered questions that our membership wants. The world wants to know."

Casimir said the discovery adds a very dark chapter to Canadian history and the state-funded residential school system.

School closed in 1978

Narcisse and her younger sister lingered in front of the memorial at the site of the residential school for more than an hour.

In front of the school is a memorial with dozens of names etched on a plaque. At the base of it people have left flowers and notes. On top rests a tiny pair of shoes.

The former Kamloops Indian Residential School. Indigenous leaders and experts are calling for the protection of unmarked burial sites to allow for further investigations. (Andrew Snucins/The Canadian Press)

Historical records had indicated that 50 children died at the school, but this new discovery shows that estimate was likely dramatically low.

The Kamloops Indian Residential School was in operation from 1890 to 1969, when the federal government took over administration from the Catholic Church to operate it as a residence for a day school, until closing in 1978.

Flags on federal buildings lowered in memory of Kamloops residential school victims Searching for records

Enrolment at the school peaked in the early 1950s at 500, according to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). Those children would have come from First Nations communities across B.C. and beyond.

Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc said they are working with the BC Coroners Service, contacting the students' home communities, protecting the remains and working with museums to find records of these deaths.

Communities across Canada have been mourning and honouring 215 residential school children since last Thursday, when Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said their remains were found at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., using ground-penetrating radar. Today, people pay their respects at a growing memorial in Vancouver. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

Casimir previously told CBC News the missing children were undocumented deaths, some of them as young as three years old.

She said the findings are "preliminary" and a report will be provided by a specialist next month.

Teachers in B.C. to wear orange, hold special ceremonies over discovery of children's remains Sask. First Nation set to examine residential school gravesite with radar this summer Support is available for anyone affected by their experience at residential schools, and those who are triggered by the latest reports.

A national Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for former students and those affected. People can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866-925-4419.