New Mass Graves of Indigenous People Found in Canada’s Schoolyard

On March 10, 2022, Canadian police announced that 169 tombs of unregistered children were found at the site of the former Grouard Mission residential school in northern Alberta.

County Police Chief Sydney Lee Halcrow said at a press conference that they had found the graves during searches through an underground detection radar and a drone.

“The grief of finding our stolen children has opened fresh wounds as we remember the horror and devastation our people felt when our children were forcibly removed from their families and communities to institutions known as residential schools,” Halcrow said.

“We can now begin our collective healing and honor the lives of these children so they can finally rest in peace,” she added.

 

Mass Genocides

According to Kisha Supernant, head of the University of Alberta's Institute of Indigenous Antiquities, which led the study, 54 burials were discovered near the monks' house, while 115 were discovered in the church cemetery.

The school was opened in 1894 by the Roman Catholic Church and closed in 1961 and has been dubbed "Grouard" in some records.

Canada forced around 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children to attend residential schools between the late 1800s and the 1990s.

The children were deprived of their languages and cultures, were separated from their siblings, and were exposed to psychological, physical, and sexual abuse.

Thousands are said to have died while attending the institutions, which were administered by numerous faiths, the most prominent of which being the Roman Catholic Church.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC), funded by the Canadian government and operated by the Catholic Church, reported at least 4,100 fatalities.

These schools were under the supervision of the Catholic Church and remained open until the early 1970s.

 

Concertation 'Schools'

On May 29, 2021, the remains of 215 children, some as young as 3, were found buried at a site that was once Canada's largest Indigenous boarding school near the city of Kamloops, British Columbia.

The remains of 751 children were also found on June 24, 2021, at a boarding school belonging to Marieval Church in Saskatchewan, as well as the remains of 182 children at St. Eugene School in British Columbia on June 30.

On July 12, 2021, the remains of 160 children were found at Kuper School on Penelakut Island, within the Southern Gulf Islands of southern Colombia.

These children faced major violations, with the Canadian TRC describing in 2015 what they had experienced as "cultural extermination," as they were prevented from speaking their native language and raped, sexually assaulted, and even deprived of food, according to many testimonies.

The Grouard Mission residential school, also known as St. Bernard’s, was run by the Roman Catholic Church between 1894 and 1957, according to the National Center for Truth and Reconciliation, a research center at the University of Manitoba. It was closed in 1961.

According to the center's website, "the school enrolled a considerable number of Metis pupils: by 1949, they accounted for half of the students in residence."

An Indigenous delegation from Canada is slated to come to Rome towards the end of March 2022 to meet with Pope Francis to address the role of the Roman Catholic Church in the Canadian residential school system.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in its final report in 2015, called on Pope Francis to apologize to residential school survivors, their families, and communities "for the Roman Catholic Church's role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools."

“We call for that apology to be similar to the 2010 apology issued to Irish victims of abuse and to occur within one year of the issuing of this Report and to be delivered by the Pope in Canada,” the commission said.

In June, Pope Francis expressed "sadness" over the discovery of unmarked graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School, but he stopped short of issuing the long-awaited apology to survivors.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the government commission of investigation investigating the institutions, ruled in 2015 that Canada's residential school system amounted to "cultural genocide."

Since May, when Tk'emlups te Secwepemc First Nation revealed the discovery of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, hundreds of unmarked graves have been discovered at former residential school sites across Canada.

This finding fueled widespread calls for justice and responsibility for the institutions' victims and survivors, as well as requests that the Canadian government reveal all information related to the facilities.

 

Reconciliation Calls

According to a recent Yellowhead Institute research, Canada is continuing to "perform" reconciliation for the sake of its own reputation rather than enacting structural reforms that will "rectify existing injustices" and address the "disparate realities" that Indigenous peoples confront in Canada.

This comes six years after the TRC issued its final report and made 94 calls to action to address the legacy of residential schools and advance reconciliation.

According to the December 2021 report, Canada executed three of the study's recommendations last year—more in three weeks than in the preceding three years.

In June alone, Canada nominated a language commissioner (No. 15), declared a National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, and established a National Day of Reconciliation (No. 80), and changed the Oath of Citizenship (No. 94).

Not a single call to action was completed in 2020, and 83 calls remain incomplete, it finds.

While these requests were quickly addressed, the study adds that they came on the heels of shocking news that made international headlines: hundreds of children's graves had been confirmed at a number of old residential schools.

The report also charges that throughout the years, the federal government has chosen to focus on implementing the calls that are “arguably the easiest”—the symbolic gestures—“while neglecting the structural changes called for by the TRC.”

“If morbid and traumatizing revelations of Indigenous children’s graves advanced completion on Calls to Action that are only symbolic, what will have to happen for Canada to complete Calls to Action that are substantive?” the report asks.