Finding of unmarked graves a traumatic event that began soul-searching
KAMLOOPS — Percy Casper, 73, spent 10 years as a child at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
He has spent the past year grieving.
A member of the Bonaparte Indian Band near Cache Creek, Casper said he was deeply distraught when he heard the news last May, when Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir, Tk'emlups te Secwepemc Nation chief, announced that a war graves expert using ground-penetrating radar had located 215 suspected unmarked graves at the site of the former school.
So, Casper grieved, for lost classmates, and for himself.
His emotions twisted into a painful knot when Indigenous leaders later visited the Vatican to meet the Pope who represents the church that he says abused him.
But his spirits have been lifted by strangers, he said.
“Families have walked up to me and literally put their hands out and said they were ashamed of who they were on account of what we went through,” he said.
Casper's emotional journey echoes a year of reckoning for Canada as it confronts the legacy of its residential school system for Indigenous children. The findings in an old apple orchard would reverberate from B.C.'s Interior to Ottawa, the Vatican and beyond.
The finding represented what Casimir called at the time an “unthinkable loss.”
The existence of unmarked graves had been a “knowing” among school survivors and elders, but the high-tech survey represented confirmation for Canada, she said.
The detection of hundreds more of suspected graves connected to residential schools across the country would follow.
Prof. Geoff Bird, an anthropologist at the school of communication and culture at Victoria's Royal Roads University, said the unmarked graves represent a profound moment in the nation's history.
“The discovery of children buried in residential schools across the country was perhaps ... the most traumatic event in recent Canadian history in terms of defining who we are,” Bird said. “When you actually have a discovery such as this, it can't do anything but impact the nation and its perception of itself.”