Lost... and found
Chance leads siblings to the truth behind the death of their young brother in a remote residential school 60 years ago
It took a coincidence — 40 years after the fact — for Emma Saganash to learn how her 6-year-old brother died and where he is buried.
If not for a work assignment in Moose Factory, Ont., she might never have learned that her brother Jonnish died of rheumatic fever and was buried in an unmarked grave near the residential school he was forced to attend in the 1950s.
“I melted down and cried my heart out,” Emma says.
For that small sense of closure, she could be considered one of the lucky ones. There is an unspecified number of unmarked graves across Canada for residential school students, and this week’s massive report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission strongly urged that work continue to locate the burial sites, many of them near now-defunct schools.
The commission said its registry lists 3,201 deaths of students. The cause of death was reported in less than half the cases.
The commission also urged that work continue to locate the unknown number of students who went missing from these schools.
Emma Saganash, a former journalist and now manager with the CBC, and her brother, NDP MP Romeo Saganash, never knew Jonnish, who was born before they were. The large family lived in Quebec at the Waswanipi reserve, a Cree community southeast of James Bay.
Jonnish, his mother Mary’s firstborn, was taken away with his halfsister Maggie from their parents in 1954 and flown to Bishop Horden School on James Bay, part of government policy at the time that was intended to assimilate aboriginal children and break them from the language and customs of their parents. Mary believed at the time that Jonnish and Maggie were going to be well cared for at the school.
Emma and Romeo attended different residential schools.
When Jonnish died in December of that year, his body was never brought back to Waswanipi.
“She was so heartbroken. All she knew was he was gone and she (would) never see him again,” Emma says of her mother.
Forty years after Jonnish’s death, Emma was on assignment working in the James Bay area in 1994 and travelled to Moose Factory.
By coincidence, an aboriginal woman who was a supervisor at the school when it operated recognized Emma from her television work. She introduced herself and later told her that Jonnish had died of rheumatic fever in hospital while a student at Bishop Horden, a detail no one in the Saganash family had known until that day.
The former supervisor had visited Jonnish as he lay dying in the hospital. The last thing he asked for was a toy car, the woman told Saganash.
Then came another shocker: the former supervisor knew where Jonnish was buried. She took Saganash to the cemetery and after a brief search, the gravesite was located. It had no marker.
Emma brought back photos of the discovery to Waswanipi to show her mother and other family members. Mary cried when she saw images of the gravesite she didn’t know existed.
“I had never heard or seen my mother cry the way she did that day. It was so painful. We all stood up and hugged each other,” Saganash says.
Within the year, the husband of the woman Saganash had met in Moose Factory made a cross out of wood and engraved Jonnish’s name on it, and the year of his birth.
Emma placed it in the ground at her brother’s grave.
“I asked my mother if she wanted him home. She said no, and that she would see him again someday,” Saganash says.