Unearthing ‘trauma and history’
Archeologists search site of former residential school to give victims a dignity in death
EDMONTON— In June, University of Alberta archeologist Kisha Supernant was scanning the earth around a dilapidated brick building on the Muskowekwan First Nation, a 90-minute drive northwest of Regina.
Just off of Highway 15, at the end of a shady lane lined with trees, the property, even in a state of disrepair, stood as a haunting reminder of a dark chapter in Canadian history.
“There’s sort of a picturesqueness to it that belies its ugly history,” Supernant said of the rural prairie property. “The trauma and history are present there. When you step on to the property, you could feel it.”
According to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR), the building operated as a residential school from 1889 to 1997.
Somewhere outside it were the unmarked graves of the children who died there, with no explanation as to how or why.
Armed with ground-penetrating radar, Supernant — part of a team that included U of A grad student Liam Wadsworth, and Terence Clark of the University of Saskatchewan — set out to find them.
“You’re out there looking for missing children and their graves, and that can be emotionally difficult work,” she said. “But it’s very deeply meaningful work, too.”
The search effort is part of the Muskowekwan First Nation’s project to preserve the history on its lands.
With time, band councillor Cynthia Desjarlais said, the community hopes to demarcate and commemorate burial sites and the area, and turn the old school into an archive or museum to teach future generations and visitors about the effects of the residential school system on the community.
Arude awakening
In 1993, Desjarlais recalled, construction work digging trenches on the property accidentally unearthed human remains and caused an upset in the community.
“I remember it clearly, everyone was pretty alarmed,” she said. “These graves were there and covered up and not even acknowledged for how many years.”
The discovery ground the excavation to a halt, the trench was covered up, and the disturbed remains were moved to a hilltop cemetery nearby, Desjarlais added.
According to NCTR documents, 19 graves were uncovered on the school site between 1992 and 1993 during the course of contract work to install a new sewage line.
“They should have been marked long ago and never were,” Desjarlais said. “That’s where our community feels really bad.”
Ry Moran, director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, said the centre was approached by Muskowekwan First Nation to help organize an effort to locate burial sites around the former school.
When residential schools were constructed, Moran explained, it was standard policy to create cemeteries alongside them.
“That tells us that the schools were operating with the assumption that certain kids weren’t going to be returning home,” he said.
The lost graves at the Muskowekwan site aren’t a unique case, Moran added, as many residential schools across the country marked burial grounds with materials that failed the test of time, and the memories of the departed in turn.
“The wood from the crosses would rot and return back to the ground,” he said. “The land would quite quickly swallow up these places and spaces and you would get high overgrowth.
“We don’t know where all the residential school cemeteries are in the country right now.”
‘A specific call to action’
Under the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 calls to action, an entire section is dedicated to addressing missing children and residential school burial sites. Among them: an appeal to the federal government to work with churches and Indigenous communities, as well as municipal and regional authorities, to locate, document, maintain and protect these grounds.
“This project is a specific response to a specific call to action to help locate these missing children,” Supernant said.
Last summer, she and her team found 13 to 15 possible gravesites with the help of both non-invasive radar technology and the knowledge of the Muskowekwan First Nation, the community at the core of the project.
“They came out with us and talked to us about things that they’d heard or seen that helped us identify areas where we attempted to use the equipment to find potential unmarked graves.”
And there’s still more work to do, Desjarlais said. She hopes to have the team back out at the site to continue surveying once the ground has thawed.
But the effort doesn’t include any plans to exhume or move the remains. And with sparse, if any, records of burials around the old school, there is little hope of identifying anyone.
The plan, rather, is to honour those children, and give them a dignity, in death at least, that is long overdue.
“We didn’t respect these children in life when they were in the schools and we continue to disrespect them in death,” Moran said. “We’re going to remain in a time of unrest until we honour these kids properly and set this right.”