Respect and recognition needed for Indian Residential School students
By Rick Garrick
Pic Mobert’s Patrick Sabourin raised a question about residential school mass burials and graves during the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation’s Nov. 9 community engagement session in Thunder Bay.
“What are they going to do,” Sabourin says about the mass burials and graves. “Are they going to put any kind of cenotaph or marker there later on?”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) found that children who died at school were buried in school or mission cemeteries, often in poorly marked graves, throughout the history of the residential school system. The TRC also found that many of the cemeteries have been abandoned since the schools were closed.
Accordingly, the TRC developed six Calls to Action related to students deaths at residential school, including the establishment of an online registry of residential school cemeteries and the development and implementation of strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites where residential school children were buried.
Sabourin says his family was not directly impacted by residential school because his “Mishomis hid them in the bush.”
“But my friends were (impacted), so I just wondered what it was about,” Sabourin says. “I’m just trying to understand this whole process — where the records came from and if I was to write a paper, where would I draw the information how to access (the records).”
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) held the community engagement session at Lakehead University’s Faculty Lounge to share information about the centre and gather feedback from community members on the best approach to implement the review and release of records for research and education.
The NCTR was set up at the University of Manitoba to house all the statements, documents and other materials collected by the TRC. The information will be sorted into three categories — public, redacted and restricted — with the public and redacted materials to be made available online at nctr.ca/map.php as time and resources permit.
Fort William CEO Marilee Nowgesic raised the issue of the unidentified photos of residential school survivors.
“Put some names to (these photos) and give them the respect they deserve,” Nowgesic says. “You stole their life, you stole their identity and you stole their image and you never told their parents that you had pictures available. Give them the pictures back with some names on it so at least they can give it to their grandchildren or their great grandchildren or share with their community.”
Nowgesic says the photos are usually identified as a group of students or a group of girls.
“Well, those girls are great mothers, good leaders, good providers,” Nowgesic says. “Whatever they were, give them their name back.”
Nowgesic says it is important to gather the names of the residential school students in the photos because current and future generations will require the names for genealogical purposes.
“They’re trying to capture their genealogy and find out their roots,” Nowgesic says. “They need those pictures to be able to make those associations of whomever the family members are that are in those pictures.”
The Thunder Bay community engagement session was one of 12 conducted by NCTR across the country.