More Unmarked Graves Found in Saskatchewan

 

Enough said?

I am increasingly scandalized by the general reaction, at least in the media, to the announced discovery of 215 unmarked graves near the Kamloops Indian Residential School; and today of maybe 751 more more near Marieval Residential School in Saskatchewan. People are talking about cancelling Canada Day in response.

What exactly do they think has been demonstrated by the discovery of unmarked graves?

Are they imagining the children were murdered? If they had been, would the police, the parents, the Department of Indian Affairs, the church bodies, or the Indian bands not have noticed at the time? Mustn’t they have all then been complicit in some vast conspiracy?

Are they imagining the children died of neglect? Estimates are that one third to one half of all children in the 19th century died before the age of five. High child mortality was a fact of life. Indian reserves, in particular, were notoriously riddled with tuberculosis: Eight times the national average. Two studies on the Prairies in the early 20th century found that 80 to 100 % of all Indian children entering schools already had tuberculosis. “An official 1907 report into Manitoba Indian Residential Schools …  included charts cataloguing pupils as either “good,” “sick” or “dead.”” (National Post, June 2, 2021). 

Some proportion of these children inevitably died; others died of the dozen common childhood diseases we have since eradicated. The Department of Indian Affairs would not pay to ship bodies home; the parents were not prepared to, or could not afford to; so they were buried locally.

Then the schools were shut down. The government might have tended the gravesites; the local band might have tended the gravesites. Neither did. Like many other cemeteries in many other places, they were left to the elements. Leave a graveyard untended, and grave markers tend to disappear. Wood burns. Stones fall over and are buried; or are ”borrowed” for construction projects.

Kingston, Ontario’s old city cemetery was closed in 1864. By the late 1880s, many of not most of the original grave markers had disappeared—less than 25 years later. Marieval Indian Residential School closed in 1997; 25 years ago. The Kamloops Residential School has been closed since 1978—33 years ago. There is no reason even to suppose the graves were originally unmarked; they might have been.

Official written records are spotty; apparently this is because the government recycled the paper at some point.

Does Canada really stand indicted for this? For not maintaining better archives? Not always easy to guess, surely, what people will decide your priorities should have been a hundred years later.

The current media and public reaction to the unmarked graves looks like hysteria.