Finding Canada’s stolen generation
Recovery of remains jolts nation coming to terms with history of racist abuse
For decades, Indigenous children were taken from their families, sometimes by force, and housed in crowded, church-run boarding schools, where they were abused and prohibited from speaking their languages. Thousands vanished altogether.
Now, a new discovery offers chilling evidence that many of the missing children may have died at these schools: The remains of as many as 751 people, mainly Indigenous children, were found at the site of a former school in the province of Saskatchewan, an Indigenous group said yesterday.
The burial site, the largest one to date, was uncovered only weeks after the remains of 215 children were found in unmarked graves on the grounds of another former churchrun school for Indigenous students near Kamloops, British Columbia.
The discoveries have jolted a nation grappling with generations of widespread and systematic abuse of Indigenous people, many of whom are survivors of the boarding schools. For decades, they suggested through their oral histories that thousands of children disappeared from the schools, but they were often met with skepticism. The revelations of two unmarked grave sites are another searing reminder of this traumatic period in history.
“This was a crime against humanity, an assault on a First Nation people,” said Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, the provincial federation of Indigenous groups. “The only crime we ever committed as children was being born Indigenous.”
The discovery of the burial site also puts new pressure on the government of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which relies on a set of laws to govern the lives of Indigenous people that date back to the 19th century. Indigenous leaders say they hope the latest revelations will be a catalyst for their long sought-after self-governance.
“We are tired of being told what to do and how to do it,” said Chief Cadmus Delorme, of the Cowessess First
Nation.
The recent unearthing of remains in Canada has reverberated globally, including in the United States, where this week the interior secretary said the country would search federal boarding schools for possible burial sites of Native American children. Hundreds of thousands of them were forcibly taken from their communities to be culturally assimilated in the schools for more than a century.
It is unclear how the children died at the schools, which were buffeted by disease outbreaks a century ago, and where children faced sexual, physical and emotional abuse and violence. Some former students of the schools have described the bodies of infants born to girls impregnated by
priests and monks being incinerated.
Both schools were part of a system started in the 19th century that took Indigenous children from their families.
A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2008 to investigate the residential schools, called the practice “cultural genocide”. Many children never returned home, and their families were given only vague explanations of their fates, or none at all. Canada had about 150 residential schools, and an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children passed through the schools between their opening around 1883 and their closing in 1996.
The commission estimated that about 4100 children went missing
nationwide from the schools. But an Indigenous former judge who led the commission, Murray Sinclair, said in an email this month that he now believed the number was “well beyond 10,000.”
Local Indigenous leaders this week demanded an inquiry into what they called a “genocide,” and called for the church and the government to turn overall records related to the administration of the schools.
Delorme also called for Pope Francis to apologise, saying that the Roman Catholic Church needed to address its actions.
“The incredible burden of the past is still with us, and the truth of that past needs to come out, however painful,” Don Bolen, the Archbishop of Regina, wrote in a letter addressed to the Cowessess group. He apologised and pledged to “do what we can to turn that apology into meaningful concrete acts.”
The discovery in Saskatchewan was made by the Cowessess First Nation at the Marieval Indian Residential School, about 140km from the provincial capital, Regina.
Delorme said that his Indigenous community, spurred by the discovery at Kamloops and in conjunction with technical teams from Saskatchewan Polytechnic, began combing the area using ground-penetrating radar on June 2, hitting as many as 751 unmarked graves.
He said he expected more bodies would be discovered.
While it is not clear how the discovery of the remains will be investigated, the Regina Police Service said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the national police, had jurisdiction in the case. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police did not respond to a request for comment.
For Canada’s 1.7 million Indigenous citizens, who make up about 4.9% of the population, the finding of yet another mass burial site is a visceral reminder of centuries of discrimination and abuse, which has led to intergenerational trauma among survivors of residential schools and their families.
Trudeau has called the discoveries in Saskatchewan and British Columbia “part of a larger tragedy,” citing the legacies of “systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced.”
This week, the federal government announced that it would provide just under $4.9 million ($5.6m) to Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan to search for graves. The provincial government previously committed $2 million.
Like Kamloops, the Marieval school, which opened in 1899, was operated for most of its history by the Roman Catholic Church for the government of Canada.
A marked cemetery still exists on the grounds of the school, which closed in 1997 and was subsequently demolished.
The commission called for a papal apology for the role of the church, which operated about 70 per cent of the schools. (The rest were run by Protestant denominations.)
But despite a personal appeal from Trudeau to the Vatican, Francis has still not taken that step. By contrast, the leadership of the United Church of Canada, the country’s largest Protestant denomination, apologised in 1998 for its role in running the schools.