The 2021 discovery of unmarked graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian residential school both shocked Canadians and confirmed what the evidence had already made obvious. This was not a single horror, but rather the initial conclusive revelation of a nationwide outrage.

It had long been known that many Indigenous children — who, for generations, were torn from their families — never returned from residential schools to their home communities. And, unlike today’s typical Canadian boarding school, witnesses and historical records attest that on-site burial grounds were a routine feature. Kimberly Murray, Canada’s independent special interlocutor tasked with delving into the residential school system’s legacy of missing children and unmarked burial sites, maintains that’s tantamount to accepting and planning in advance for untimely deaths.

“Survivors have been saying for decades that children died at these institutions; that children were buried at these institutions; that they, themselves, had to bury the children who died at these institutions,” she reiterated earlier this week during a webinar sponsored by Aird & Berlis LLP. “Canada did not listen.”

Murray recently released the second of two reports she has prepared since her 2022 appointment and is set to release a final report with recommendations in late October. This aligns with her mandate from the Canadian government to examine the barriers that Indigenous families and communities are facing in their efforts to find their missing children, and to provide advice on possible legal supports for locating, commemorating and protecting the dignity of those children.

Mapping out dismal fates

She describes her recent volume of findings, entitled, Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience, as “an antidote to denialism”. It documents the experience of Indigenous children and young adults in:

• Indian residential schools;
• the Good Shepherd Homes, a network of enterprises that enlisted young women deemed to unruly or debauched in unpaid, disciplinary labour; and,
• a series of other destinations, including Indian hospitals, private institutions, homes for unwed mothers and penitentiaries.

The latter includes a form of servitude known as the “working out” system, in which Indian residential schools and government Indian agents brokered children’s placements as manual labourers on farms and various other worksites. As well, the report highlights the Cecil Butters Memorial Hospital, a private facility where Indigenous children with Down Syndrome were contracted out for medical/scientific research.

This wide range of possible fates compounds the challenges for families and communities attempting to learn what happened to their children. It also extends obligations to seek, acknowledge and publicly share those details beyond the parameters of the former residential school system.

“The government would apprehend the children from their communities, put them into Indian residential schools and they would be transferred from those institutions to Indian hospitals, mental health asylums, prisons, reformatories — it’s a very long list,” Murray said. “We know the children were taken elsewhere and died elsewhere and are buried in burial sites all over Turtle Island, and the families don’t know where they are.”

Impediments to the search

Fragmented and/or inaccessible records, hindered access to burial sites and the logistics of finding graves and identifying individuals within mass graves all pose obstacles for searchers. Institutions typically imparted little or no information to inhabitants’ families and internal record-keeping was often incomplete, inaccurate or deliberately deceptive.

Approximately 5 million records from the parties to the national residential schools settlement agreement now reside with the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, but they remain subject to rules regulating privacy and access to information — creating costs, bureaucracy and the possibility of denied requests. A trove of other pertinent documents are still held by churches and other institutions and organizations.

“We have many issues with Indigenous data sovereignty. Records about Indigenous people are all over the country, not in control of Indigenous people,” Murray said. “Records are so important for the tracing of the children — like provincial records, university records and some very important institutions. A lot of universities were involved in the medical experimentation. They all need to search their records and see what they have in relation to Indigenous children.”

Access to burial sites becomes more complicated when they are located on private property or are now part of municipal cemeteries where there is little receptiveness to exploration. If they ever existed, there are few grave markers left today. Pinpointing gravesites on sizable campuses typically requires a mix of historical evidence, topographical information and technological tools.

Murray cited the example of the residential school in Kenora, Ontario, where school officials’ correspondence reports that the original cemetery was full and second site would be established “across the road”, but with no other details of its whereabouts. Searchers generally begin with witness testimony.

“They are the children who had to dig those graves on those sites, or they remember where they were told: You can’t go over there; stay away from that area,” she recounted. “They are our witnesses and there’s an urgent need to have them share their experiences and what they know so we can record it to guide these searches. But many survivors still can’t speak about their experiences to this day. It’s too difficult for them.”

A call for upstanders

Beyond the mandate to provide informed advice to the Canadian government, Murray connects her work and reporting to the larger context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s mission. That is to honour and seek justice for Indigenous peoples’ experiences in the residential school system and its nefarious offshoots; to undercover the truth about missing children; and to create awareness so all Canadians can know what happened.

From there, non-Indigenous residents of Canada will have to take the next envisioned steps toward reconciliation. Those are to remember, to care and to change.

“I encourage people to not be bystanders, but instead become upstanders,” Murray urged.

That builds from a foundation of awareness — as prospective upstanders acknowledge the systemic ideology of subjugation underpinning the residential school system, and the harms and ongoing trauma it has inflicted — but must also be translated into values and actions. Notably, Murray characterizes denialism as a “uniquely non-Indigenous problem” and thus assigns other non-Indigenous voices the responsibility for countering it.

“Upstanders speak up and address the denialism that is happening,” she advised. “Canada and the churches dehumanized the children in life and dehumanized the children after death by burying them in unmarked graves, often in mass graves and not according to their spiritual beliefs, and without informing their families. And it was all done, in many cases, just to save money. We have an ongoing need for full reparations in relation to the missing children.”