The Main — June 1: We Have to Talk About Alberta's Residential Schools
News that the remains of 215 children are beside a former residential school in British Columbia will almost certainly lead to more unsettling discoveries here
A team that used sonar at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site has found the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has estimated the death toll of the residential school system to at least 4,100 children, with estimates as high as 6,000. But the discovery in Kamloops is so unsettling, so grotesque, that the country is having a moment of deep self-reflection whether it was prepared to have it or not. Will Alberta have one, too?
This newsletter is focused on the municipal elections in Alberta this October. Bear with us, though, as we pause to look at an issue that’s important to all governments in Canada, but is often given performative gestures rather than action. What happened at more than 130 residential schools—the first of which opened in 1831, the last of which closed in 1997, in the name of nation-building—is a legacy all those who’ve made this country home as settlers must confront.
For Alberta, what comes next could very well be hard. As Rob Houle, an Indigenous writer in Edmonton, notes in the tweet below, Alberta is the province that had the most residential schools in Canada (more than 25 of them):
Discussion of graves at residential schools is not new. There is an unmarked gravesite astride the Red Deer Indian Industrial School, with the remains of an estimated 50 to 70 children buried within. In Manitoba, where the Brandon Residential School once stood, there is an unmarked gravesite at what’s become an RV park, where an estimated 50 children were buried. A 10-minute search of the database for the Royal Commission for Aboriginal Peoples, a six-year project by the federal government to improve the relationship between Indigenous people and Canada, and one that produced thousands of documents from witness testimony and expert reports, reveals discussion of graves at residential schools in Alberta. Ottawa received the report in 1996 (author’s name slightly misspelled in tweet below):
CBC reporter Terri Trembath spoke to a residential school survivor in southern Alberta after the Kamloops story broke:
When Bromley was 10-years-old, she remembers other students talked about graves behind the school — but she doesn't remember seeing any headstones."I thought about the backyard, apparently there were some graves there and the first thing I thought of was, I wonder if there are some kids that were buried, you know?" Bromley said.
Bromley's classmates were right — there were students' graves in the schoolyard. A letter from an Indian agent to the school's principal from 1945 requests that Indigenous workers be made to redig the graves next to the school, to make them even deeper.
There are renewed calls to fulfil Indigenous leaders’ long push to have all residential school sites in Canada scanned for unmarked graves. Those calls cannot be ignored now. There is also a push to finally deal with the many place and institutional names in the province that honour people connected to the residential school system:
While it is perhaps heartening to know that the discovery in Kamloops might lead to action across Canada, despite action being called for time after time in the past, including the recent Truth and Reconciliation process, to Rage it also underlines how so much of this story has been known for so long for those who are interested in knowing it.
Thankfully, it seems more of us could be about to: