TORONTO -- Cowessess First Nation says it has found an estimated 751 unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.
- WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing
The Cowessess First Nation, located 164 kilometres east of Regina, began radar scanning of the school grounds and surrounding area on June 1. The findings of that search were officially announced at a news briefing Thursday.
“The Catholic church representatives removed the headstones and today they are unmarked graves,” he said.
The ground penetrating radar used to search the grounds marked 751 hits, but Delorme said the machine isn’t perfect and there is a 10 to 15 per cent margin of error with the process.
“Each of these hits will be assessed by a technical team, and we will get a verified number in the coming weeks,” he said.
At this stage of the investigation they are unable to identify the remains in the unmarked graves, which may belong to both adults and children.
“We cannot confirm that they are all children, but there are oral stories that there are adults in this gravesite as well,” Delorme added.
He said that students could have come from southern Saskatchewan as well as from Manitoba.
“I have been advised from oral stories of survivors that some southwestern areas of Manitoba did go to Marieval,” he added.
While he isn’t able to confirm exactly which nations would have attended the school, he said that the majority of children would have come from Treaty Four nations.
The goal for Cowessess First Nation is to identify the remains and mark the graves to honour those lost to the residential school.
“One day there will be a monument there. Every one of those graves will be marked and probably not every grave will have the exact name, but that is our end goal.”
He is confident that the Church will hand over records pertaining to the school, but at present they have just one book of records from a Knowledge Keeper, who he said held onto it when she was young, despite threat of charges.
“She mentioned that they were threatening to charge her for keeping those records, so she was able to keep one of those books,” said Delmore.
He added that additional information comes from oral histories and grandparents who took account of having to bury their own classmates and that they’ve been working to collect and preserve these stories.
While he anticipates the co-operation of the Catholic Church, he wants an apology from the Pope.
“The Pope needs to apologize for what has happened to the Marieval residential school impact on Cowessess First Nation survivors and descendents,” he said.
This discovery comes less than a month after the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children buried in unmarked graves at Kamloops Residential School in Kamloops, B.C.
The Marieval residential school operated from 1898 to 1996 in the Qu'Appelle Valley. It was run by the Roman Catholic Church until Cowessess First Nation took over its operations in 1981.
“There will be hundreds more unmarked graves and burial sites located across our First Nations lands at the sites of former Indian Residential Schools,” Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations Chief Bobby Cameron said in a news release. “There are thousands of families across our Treaty territories that have been waiting for their children to come home. Saskatchewan had the highest number of residential schools and highest number of survivors. There will be hundreds more.”
‘IT’S STILL GOING ON’
A survivor of Marieval Residential School said that she had no choice but to go there and that one of her parents would have been sent to jail if they didn’t send a child to the school.
“In order to keep the family together, we went to boarding school. They brought us there, we stayed there. And we learned, they pounded it into us, and really they were very mean. When I say pounding, I mean pounding,” Elder Florence Sparvier said at the press conference.
The students were forced to learn about the Catholic god, and the nuns and priests condemned First Nations people for not following the Catholic religion.
“They told us our people, our parents and grandparents had no, they didn't have a way to be spiritual, because we were all heathens,” she said.
She was the third generation of her family to go to the residential school. Her mother and grandmother both attended.
“They were putting us down as a people,” she said. “So we learn how to not like who we were. And that has gone on and on, and it's still going on.”
Through the attempt to assimilate Indigenous people, the nuns and priests who ran the residential schools forced them to view themselves differently, Sparvier said. She said they were made to believe that they didn’t have souls.
“A lot of the pain that we see in our people right now comes from there,” she said.
‘WE WILL NOT STOP UNTIL WE FIND ALL OF OUR CHILDREN’
FSIN Chief Bobby Cameron spoke at the press conference saying that there will be a lot of work to do to heal the wounds caused by residential schools, and that with more searches being conducted there will be more findings.
Chief Cameron added that the victims of residential schools had done nothing to deserve the treatment they received.
“The only crime we ever committed as children was being born Indigenous,” he said.
Searches of residential school grounds across the country will continue, but he said that the work won’t stop there.
“We will find more bodies and we will not stop until we find all of our children,” he said.
“We will do a search of every Indian residential school site and we won't stop there. We will also search all the sanatoriums of Indian hospitals, of all the sites where people were taken and abused, tortured, neglected and murdered.”
The news of unmarked graves on former residential school grounds has made headlines around the world.
“The world is watching, Canada, as we unearth the findings of genocide,” he said.
He added that with these findings, there is finally the evidence to support what Indigenous people have been saying about the abuse in residential schools for decades.
“Canada will be known as a nation who tried to exterminate the First Nations,” he said. “Now we have evidence. Evidence of what the survivors of the Indian residential schools have been saying all along for decades that they were treated without humanity.”
“They were tortured, they were abused, and they seen their classmates die. They even had to dig graves for their own students.”
Going forward Chief Cameron wants to see more than an apology, he said. He wants the Canadian government and the Church to hand over the documents and records from these institutions.
“Our people deserve more than apologies and sympathies, which we are grateful for, our people deserve justice.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reacted to the news saying in a statement that his heart breaks for the community.
“The findings in Marieval and Kamloops are part of a larger tragedy. They are a shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced – and continue to face – in this country. And together, we must acknowledge this truth, learn from our past, and walk the shared path of reconciliation, so we can build a better future.”
