Deaths of Native children attending residential schools to be addressed, maybe
Natives Push to Find Remains
Monday May 14th - By JORGE BARRERA, NATIONAL BUREAU
A Native group is threatening an "escalating campaign of civil disobedience" to force the federal government into identifying and repatriating the bodies of 50,000 Native children who the group claims died in residential schools.
Thirty-five members of the group, called The Friends of the Disappeared, occupied the Vancouver offices of Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada on Friday.
"Until the remains of these children are repatriated (to traditional lands) and their murderers brought to justice, church and government facilities across Canada will be disrupted in an escalating campaign of civil disobedience," said the group in a statement sent to Sun Media.
The group, made up of Indian residential school survivors and their supporters, claims 50,000 children died in the schools.
Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice has asked the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created as part of a compensation package for school survivors, to count the dead and find where they are buried.
FINDING DEAD IMPOSSIBLE
But naming and finding them may be impossible. Many were buried in unmarked graves and the records are incomplete.
The country's leading scholar on residential schools, Trent University professor John Milloy, was asked 10 years ago by a family to find a child who committed suicide in one of the schools. Milloy, however, said he could find no records to lead him to a body.
"You are not going to get a lot of information on the number of children who died," said Milloy.
Bob Watts, interim executive director of the commission, remains optimistic. More and more records are coming into their hands, including private documents like school officials' diaries.
"We are getting more and more files on a daily basis," said Watts, former chief of staff to Assembly of First Nations National Chief Phil Fontaine. "There is more and more history coming forward."
PAUPER'S BURIAL
Native children were buried "two in a grave" in at least one residential school, according to documents discovered by Milloy in the National Archives of Canada.
The children were buried together to save money.
"I directed the undertaker to be as careful as possible in his charge, so he gave them a burial as near as possible to that of a pauper. They are buried two in a grave," wrote Rev. J. Woodsworth, principal of a Red Deer, Alta., school in a 1918 letter to the Department of Indian Affairs.