The tragedy of residential schools is a story that must be told, and retold

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/06/2021 (1234 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When those 215 unmarked graves were discovered at a former Indian residential school in Kamloops, just four weeks ago, the first thought of many was that there was much more to come.

It didn’t take long. Now we know that far more bodies, 751 in all, lie in unmarked graves at the site of the former Marieval residential school in southeastern Saskatchewan.

The same thought applies: no doubt there will be many more such discoveries in the months ahead, each one a fresh shame for Canada.

This will be painful for many, especially those who survived residential schools and those who still live with the harms inflicted by that system.

But perhaps there is a silver lining: the constant re-telling of the stories will, hopefully, make it impossible for this dark part of Canada’s history to be brushed aside, as it was for many decades.

After all, as Indigenous leaders remind us, none of this was unknown. More than a century ago Canadian newspapers were reporting on their front pages that children were being starved and neglected in residential schools. They detailed how “Indian boys and girls are dying like flies.” Yet the politicians and the public just didn’t care.

Now they — we — are being forced to listen to these stories, over and over again. Good. The stories need to be retold and we need to listen, as uncomfortable as that is. It’s the least that can be done to honour the memories of children who were mistreated in life and then consigned to anonymity in death.

Still, there are always fresh twists to the tale. In the case of the Marieval school, where the unmarked gravesites were identified by the Cowessess First Nation, it appears the Catholic archdiocese that ran the school for most of its 98-year history actually removed headstones from the graves sometime in the 1960s.

That, as Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme pointed out, would be not just a misdeed but a crime. And it suggests a more sinister motive — to cover up the abuse that occurred at the school and to erase from human memory the lives that were lost.

Chief Delorme was careful to note that what was discovered is not a mass grave, but hundreds of unmarked burial sites. The evidence points not to mass killing as such, but to an effort to remove the visible physical signs of deaths that occurred over many years, and thereby blot out the past.

That, fortunately, is no longer possible. Canada is being forced to come to terms with the history of the residential schools and their legacy into the present day.

It was striking, too, that the first two questions to Delorme when he presented his findings on Thursday were from journalists from Germany and Spain. As they say, the world is watching, and Canada is finding that its cherished self-image as the world’s good guy, the one with clean hands who’s always quick to point out the sins of others, is very much in question.

The answer to all this must start with facing up to the truth. Chief Delorme made that point when he was asked what the world should understand about the discovery at Cowessess First Nation.

“That the truth is there,” he said. “When truth is given and told and accepted, then reconciliation can prevail.”

Accepting the truth also means taking action to repair the damage. The federal and some provincial governments have already set aside money to identify other unmarked graves, and that’s an important first step.

Indigenous peoples are facing many other problems, certainly. But those problems have deep roots in the past, and rescuing the lost children from an anonymous death is an integral part of coming to terms with that history.