How did thousands of Indigenous boys go missing in Canada?

Last month’s announcement on Canada that the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found on the grounds of Kamloops Indian Residential School has left the country in shock.

Flags from across Canada flew at half mast and impromptu tributes of moccasins or children’s shoes emerged, often inscribed “215,” including one in front of the Parliament Building in Ottawa.

“Many survivors, my relatives, have been saying for years: that there have been a lot of deaths, that there are a lot of unidentified graves,” said Perry Bellegarde, National President of the Assembly of First Nations, the largest indigenous organization in the country.

He was referring to children separated from their families and forced to attend the famous boarding schools from Canada, such as Kamloops, in order to assimilate them to Western culture.

“But no one ever believed the survivors,” he added. “And now, with the discovery of the Kamloops trench, everything is horrible, it’s tragic and it’s painful,” he remarked.

An estimated 150,000 Indigenous children have passed through the schools between their opening in 1883 and their closure in 1996.

Justin Trudeau government initiatives

Since taking office in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has prioritized the launch of a list of 94 actions to commemorate students and improve the lives of indigenous peoples.

But leaders of indigenous communities believe the government still has a long way to go.

The discovery of the graves gave new impetus to the national debate on how to repair the history of exploitation of indigenous peoples. Many wonder how so many children ended up at this burial site.

The surveys

Efforts to find remains began about twenty years ago at the Kamloops School, which operated from 1890 to the late 1970s and was the largest in Canada at the time. It reached a maximum of 500 students.

Members of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation made the grim discovery last month after using ground penetrating radar or ground penetrating radar.

Among the 215 bodies found on the radar, it appears that a boy’s body died at the age of 3, said Tk’emlups te Secwepemc chief Rosanne Casimir. All the children were buried decades ago Explain.

Casimir also said he expects more remains to be discovered as the land continues to be explored this month. The community is now working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the British Columbia Forensic Service.

On Friday, Casimir reported that the bodies found so far appeared to be buried in different “places unidentified burial which, to our knowledge, is also not documented. “

Residential school violence and abuse

At the end of the 19th century, Canada reserved land for Indigenous peoples through often questionable treaties, while directly seized these lands in some places, including British Columbia.

In 1883, the government added a new dimension to its exploitation of Indians. Indigenous children in many parts of Canada were forced to attend residential schools, often far from their communities.

They were mostly run by churches and in each of them the use of indigenous languages ​​and cultural practices was prohibited, often violently.

Diseases and sexual abuse, physical and emotional were prevalent.

The Kamloops school was run by the Catholic Church until 1969, when the federal government took over the school system.

Reports from an inspector and doctor indicated that Kamloops students were sometimes severely malnourished.

“Cultural genocide”

A National Truth and Reconciliation Commission created by the Canadian government spent six years listening to 6,750 witnesses to document the history of the schools.

In a 2015 report, he concluded that the system was a form of “cultural genocide”.

The commission also demanded an apology from the Pope for the role of the Catholic Church.

Pope Francis on Sunday refrained from making a formal apology, but said “the sad discovery increases awareness of the pain and suffering of the past.”

Murdered babies

Some former students testified before the commission that school priests had children with native students and that the babies had been taken from their young mothers and killed.

In some cases, their bodies were thrown into the ovens. According to the commission, many students also died from illness, accidents, fires and fatal escape attempts.

Schools suffered mass deaths when infectious diseases spread there, according to a report released this year on the burial grounds by Scott Hamilton, professor of anthropology at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay.

The doubtful figures of horror

When a child died in residential school, his family often received vague explanations or said he had simply run away and disappeared, according to the commission.

When schools recognized the deaths of children, until the 1960s, they generally refused to return the bodies to their families. Leftovers were only returned if it cost less than burying them in schools.

In its report, the committee calculated that at least 4,100 students died or disappeared in residential schools and demanded that the government be accountable for all these children. However, he did not specify exactly how many were missing.

Murray Sinclair, a former judge and senator who chaired the commission, said in an email last week that he now believed the figure was “much more than 10,000”.

Since the commission finished its task, it has started a federal project to document the plight of the boys who never returned to their families after being sent to residential schools and who are now commonly known as “the missing children”.

So far, remains have appeared or were discovered in unidentified graves thanks to construction sites or natural phenomena at the sites of other old schools, but nothing of the magnitude of Kamloops.

Kisha Supernant, an Indigenous woman who chairs the Institute for Prairie Archeology and Indigenous Peoples at the University of Alberta, runs equipment that uses georradars and other technologies to search for remains.

Hamilton said locating burial sites is often difficult due to bad records, their loss and the relocation of some schools.

“These cemeteries are now often unidentified,” he said. “We don’t know what they looked like 50 or 60 years ago. The problem is, they haven’t been maintained. After schools closed, properties were often abandoned.

What is happening now?

In a special debate in the House of Commons on June 1, Trudeau said Canada had let down the 215 boys whose remains were found, along with the others. minors who have never returned to their communities boarding schools.

“Today some of the children found in Kamloops, who have yet to be found in other parts of the country, are believed to be grandparents or great-grandparents,” he said. “They are not, and it is Canada’s fault.”

Trudeau said the government had heeded requests for money and other help from Indigenous leaders to use radars and various technologies to search for student remains in other schools.

In 2019, he budgeted C $ 27 million ($ 22.35 million) to search for graves. But the money was not distributed.

Bellegarde said he hoped the upheaval following the discovery of Kamloops will cause Canada to accelerate efforts to achieve reconciliation and end the discrimination and the large economic gap between indigenous peoples and the rest of the country.

“We have to use this as a catalyst,” he said. “We helped build this great country and no one is going anywhere. We have to work together, so let’s roll up our sleeves and do that work.”

Source: The New York Times

Translation: Elisa Carnelli

CB