Skip to main content

10 000

In the spring of 2023, Kapawe'no First Nation on the northwest edge of Lesser Slave Lake, announced the results of ground-penetrating radar indicating 169 more potential graves found at the St. Bernard (Grouard) Mission School. 

This brings the known total of possible grave sites of residential school students to over 10, 000.  This total is the reflection of the announced results of ground penetrating radar between 2021 and 2023 from 18 different Indigenous communities from British Columbia to Ontario where residential schools were situated. (1) 

There are 139 residential schools that are recognised by the federal government.  These schools (the ones generally referred to in the media) would have been funded by the federal government and/or churches.  There are many more that are not accounted for in the 'official' numbers as they were funded by provincial governments or local churches/communities but they all had the same mandate; assimilation. 

Total of inferred graves to date: over 10 000

Total number of communities in Canada with recognised residential schools: 139

Total number of communities searched: 18...

            ...13%

87% of the recognised Canadian residential schools have not gone through the process of searching with ground penetrating radar.  And we are already at 10 000.

150 000 Indigenous children are recorded as having attended residential schools in Canada between 1894 and 1996.  7% of those students (10, 000) are assumed buried at these same schools given current data. As I try to wrap my head around these figures, I wonder what 7% of the student population in my community is. 

I'm just going to leave that thought with you.  

(1) Wikipedia; Canadian Indian Residential School Gravesites. July 2023

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Racism Without Discrimination

When you’re on the phone with someone in service who has a very thick accent which makes them difficult to understand and you get mad, does that make you racist?   When somebody cuts you off in traffic and you notice the person is Japanese, does that make you racist? When they’re...I could give so many examples.   Here’s my take on it.   Wikipedia: Racism is t he belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to physical appearance and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another. [1] [2] [3] [4] It may also mean prejudice , discrimination , or antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different ethnicity . [2] [3] Modern variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. These views can take the form of social actions , practices or beliefs, or political systems in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to...

215

  215 My heart is breaking. I know the pain of grieving the death of a child. I live with it daily.  It never leaves.  It never will.  I can’t begin to imagine the agony of having my child taken away from me to go to a boarding school far away.  I can’t imagine that child not coming back...ever.  I can’t imagine the frustration and trauma of not being told what happened to them, if they are alive or dead. I can’t imagine waking up every day to that same reality with no conclusion.   I can’t imagine that I would survive that - emotionally, spiritually.  I believe it would destroy me.   I know the only way I got through my experience was with the support of my family, my friends and my community. I can’t imagine how I would have survived without that support.   A big question that has repeatedly popped up throughout the global pandemic of this past year is how we can continue to support each other when we ourselves are drain...