Opinion: Unmarked graves prove Canada’s genocide of Indigenous children

Article content

This is what genocide looks like — a mass of unmarked graves with the bodies of 215 children as young as three, whose identities are unknown and whose deaths are undocumented.

It is our nation’s shame that they died after being taken from their families by the federal government and put into what was supposed to be the care of the Catholic Church over the 88 years that the Kamloops Indian Residential School operated, beginning in 1890.

Once Canada’s largest residential school, with close to 500 students in the 1950s, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate ran it for 79 years, and then the federal government took over for its final nine years before it was closed in 1978. (Canada’s last residential school remained open until 1996.)

Among the things that we do know happened at the Kamloops school is that children were whipped for speaking their own language.

The fact that so many children died under the care of a religious order named for Christianity’s most revered mother only puts into sharper focus the depth of the disdain and disregard the church and government had for them.

Article content

They were treated savagely by people with a smug reverence for their own superiority and complete disregard for the sanctity of other humans’ lives.

After all these years, the unmarked graves are tangible proof of what happened there, evidence of what generations of First Nations people have been saying.

Residential school atrocities are not stories. They are truths.

And, tragically, disturbingly, more proof may well be found as radar detection continues in Kamloops, and with investigations now likely to be expanded to other residential school sites.

But the number of bodies is a mere whisper of countless thousands of children who heroically endured and somehow survived. The physical, emotional and spiritual wounds inflicted on them is part of the cultural trauma buried so deeply that it is passed through the generations as if it’s part of the DNA.

It is also part of ours. This is Canada’s history, a legacy that continues to inform our present where First Nations women and girls disappear and somehow no one is able to find out why.

It lurks in hospital emergency rooms and wards where Canada’s first peoples have been mocked, berated and denied treatment. We have proof of that because Joyce Echaquan recorded on her phone what was happening to her as she lay dying in a Quebec hospital last September.

Every day, the disparity between First Nations and mainstream Canada plays out in the 58 First Nations communities that have no water fit to drink, or the hundreds of others that don’t have proper housing and sanitation.

Article content

First Nations people are disproportionately poor, homeless, addicted, incarcerated, or in foster care. By every measure of well-being, their life experience bears faint resemblance to that of other Canadians, including those who have arrived most recently.

We know this. We know what needs to be done to end this shameful, ongoing discrimination from the shelves and shelves of reports — most recently the volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry, and just about every report the B.C. child and youth advocate has written.

But the finding of the school burial sites — more than anything — is Canada’s genocide moment.

This is undeniable proof that needs to be fully investigated.

Every technology available needs to be used to find all of the missing children and identify them so that they can finally go home to be reunited with families, honoured with appropriate ceremonies, and mourned.

Only when the grieving is done can we ask their relatives and communities how best to mark these killing fields and honour those who heroically survived.

After every genocide, people say never again. Yet, it keeps happening despite the plaques and memorials.

I’ve been inside Rwandan churches were massacres took place, and in the memorial in Kigali where bones are divided by type — femurs here, skulls there — as if they were pot shards, not people.

I’ve seen skulls stacked in pagodas and trod the path of Cambodian killing fields where five decades on after every rainstorm more teeth and bone fragments protrude from the Earth.

Article content

I’ve been to Sarajevo where parks where children once played were turned into cemeteries.

In Germany and Poland, I’ve gone to former Nazi concentration camps and walked past row after row after row of suitcases with familiar names on them, including the surnames of some of my ancestors. There are cases of hair shaved from prisoners’ heads. Baby clothes. I’ve seen the execution walls, stood in the poisonous shower rooms, seen the ovens and the railway tracks and cars that carried some of the six million.

I left Auschwitz catatonic and unable to speak about the experience for days. These are things that I can never forget.

We must not forget those genocides. We must not forget our own, which proves that Canada’s commitment to human rights and equality is nascent at best.

But not forgetting means more than official apologies, designating days for mourning or visiting memorials sites. Never forgetting requires actively remembering genocides’ root causes and actively changing things.

To best honour these lost children, we need to create a Canada where every day, every child is valued, cared for and given every opportunity to reach their full potential.

dbramham@postmedia.com

Twitter: @bramham_daphne

Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion delivered straight to your inbox at 7 a.m., Monday to Friday by subscribing to our Sunrise newsletter here.