Calls for action are growing around the country, including by supporting searches at other school sites and creating a national day of mourning
leaders and community members say it is only the beginning of an important – but painful – national reckoning.
Chief Bellegarde said the discovery has opened painful wounds for many residential school survivors, who have long told of unmarked graves and uncounted deaths, but “the sad part is nobody believed them.”The gravesites were identified using ground-penetrating radar technology, as has been employed in other similar searches, including at the Muscowequan Indian Residential School near Lestock, Sask.
The Prime Minister has ordered flags on federal buildings to be lowered in memory of the 215 children, and several premiers and mayors across the country have done the same on other government buildings. “The death of our children is a crime against humanity. But Canada has never treated it as such,” Mr. Mamakwa said. “This country must own up to its past, as must all its governments and institutions for its role in the horror it created in residential schools.”
In Ontario, the NDP called on the Ontario government to investigate all lands and properties associated with residential schools, as well as institute an annual day of mourning and remembrance. While work has been quietly underway to identify burial sites in places like Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, Dr. Hamilton said he’d been waiting for a larger story to emerge and push the issue back into the forefront, as happened last week.
The commission used satellite imagery and maps on a sample of school locations in an effort to locate unmarked gravesites, and found possible cemeteries “in a surprisingly large number” of locations.“For the most part, the cemeteries that the Commission documented are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance,” the report said.
“The level of trauma, the level of illness, the level of death, the level of morbidity, the level of chronic illness in these schools was far worse than what the regular mainstream Canadian society experienced,” Dr. Hamilton says, adding that the impacts of colonialism led to higher rates of morbidity for those living on reserve as well.
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