How many Indigenous children’s graves remain to be found in Canada?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2021 (1281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Warning: This story contains details of residential schools and the abuse that took place there.

On the national memorial site for students who died or went missing from residential schools in Canada, a list of eight students are remembered from Marieval Indian Residential School, run by the Roman Catholic Church.

The names of the eight students are Allen Glen Pelletier, Gerald Trottier, Hubert Delorme, John Still, Marie Louise Acoose, Mary Jane Sparvier, Victoria Still and William Alexon.

They were all the students who were confirmed, through official records shared with the The Truth and Reconciliation Commission by the government and by the Catholic Church, to have died there during the Saskatchewan school’s operation for almost 100 years between 1898 and 1997.

A major revelation Thursday showed hundreds of names may be missing from the memorial for the Marieval school — a fact that may similarly hold for residential schools across the country.

On Thursday, Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus Delorme announced the nation had located a suspected 751 unmarked grave sites on the Marieval property. Some of those buried may have been adults, Delorme said, and the margin of error for the technology used means the number of graves could be fewer, but no fewer than 600.

By any account, the discrepancy between the eight students identified to have died at Marieval, and the hundreds of graves found on the site speaks volumes about the “harrowing” task ahead for Canada in locating and identifying all the children who died in this country’s residential school system.

No one yet knows just how many children in total there were, but the discoveries in Kamloops, B.C., and Marieval are helping Canadians understand that the number is almost certainly orders of magnitude higher than initially documented in the limited reports shared with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

That number, 3,201, was already high, indicating a mortality rate for residential schoolchildren at least two time higher than that of the general population before 1950. The memorial adds names on an ongoing basis, and has added 980 more since the initial report, bringing the registered total beyond 4,000.

“We all must put down our ignorance and accidental racism of not addressing the truth that this country has with Indigenous people,” Delorme said Thursday during a virtual news conference.

The locating of 751 likely graves using ground-penetrating radar technology is a revelation even those involved in the TRC find staggering.

“The results from Saskatchewan today are kind of running a cold chill through my body, even though I know there are many children buried in most of the residential school grounds in a large part of the country,” said Scott Hamilton, the Lakehead University anthropology professor who wrote a report on the challenge of locating and identifying the bodies of children who died at residential schools for the TRC.

“It’s a daunting, frankly kind of horrifying challenge.”

Using information provided by coroners, government statistics and records kept for periods of time by the federal government and by churches, the TRC initially counted 3,201 deaths at residential schools. Of those, 2,040 were named, and they were memorialized by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.

But Justice Murray Sinclair, former senator and chair of the TRC, has long said the number of children who died at these institutions is likely much higher. After the revelation that 215 unmarked graves had been found at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, he estimated in interviews the numbers could be as high as 15,000 to 25,000, though emphasizing that we will not know for sure until more searches are done, and more documents are gathered and analyzed.

“If you just extrapolate the number of children at this school to the 138 schools listed in the settlement agreement,” he said in one radio interview this month on the Kamloops discovery. “We know that the number is much larger.”

Gaps in the data available to the TRC were highlighted in its 2015 reports. They included unequal reporting across jurisdictions on health statistics, and the fact that government policies allowed records from the then-Indian Affairs Department to be destroyed after five or 10 years, depending on their nature.

Some children were also sent home to die when they were found to be seriously ill. That would probably leave those children’s names off registers kept by schools.

Hamilton put it bluntly.

“The numbers that are cited in the 2015 reports represent the absolute minimum that we know for sure on the basis of the very incomplete documentation that survives,” he said. “We have no sense of the magnitude of the problem we’re about to embark on.”

Hamilton said it should serve as a reckoning for Canadians — even if that reckoning is overdue.

“Canadians have to start thinking more seriously about the numbers being thousands upon thousands more children who died,” he said. “We know that number is big. When you start thinking about the stark realities, you realize this is a story we’ll bear witness to repeatedly for years.”

The Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day for anyone experiencing pain or distress as a result of a residential school experience. Support is available at 1-866-925-4419.