![]() ![]() “He was a little guy, lying in the bed in the infirmary, dying, and I didn’t know ’til he died.” His brother, Dalton, fell ill, but Silver was not told. Photograph: Peter Mccabe/AFP/Getty ImagesĪnother witness, Ray Silver, told the commission about his time at the Alberni Indian residential school, in British Columbia. Members of the community of the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, Quebec, march through the town to commemorate the news about Kamloops. There is another name for that program: a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which spent five years hearing the stories of survivors from those schools, described it as “cultural genocide”. In practice, that meant stripping Indigenous students of their culture, language – and everything that made them Indigenous. One official wrote in 1910 that those schools were “geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem”. Some schools were government-run others were administered by the church. Soon, the government would come for her, too: she attended the Kamloops school in the 1940s. Shirley Leon recalled seeing cattle trucks driving on to her reserve as a child – and then “seeing my cousins cry and then they were put on these trucks, and hauled off – we didn’t know where”, she told an inquiry decades later. Memories remain vivid for many survivors. The dead, the dying, and the sick and the convalescent were all together.” He called the conditions “criminal”. In hundreds of other cases, a cause of death is unknown.ĭuring the 1918 influenza pandemic, the principal of one Alberta school wrote in a letter to the department: “We have no isolation ward and no hospital equipment of any kind. More than 150 would die of influenza and a similar number of pneumonia. Roughly 900 students died of tuberculosis in the schools. Photograph: National Center For Truth And Reconciliation/EPA Suicide, neglect and disease all contributed to the devastating loss of life.Ī gathering at the Kamloops Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, in 1937. The real number is certainly much higher.įor decades, the mortality rate for Indigenous children in these schools ranged between twice as high and five times higher than non-Indigenous schoolchildren. Thousands were subject to physical, emotional and sexual abuse.Īccording to the official register, 3,213 died. ![]() Those memories will stay with me all my life.”īetween 18, the Canadian state abducted more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their parents and forced them into these schools as part of a campaign of forced assimilation. ![]() “Their eyes and look flashed in my memory, the things they said to me without uttering a word. “Those who disappeared or never made it home, those I knew were abused physically, sexually, spiritually,” Saganash wrote in an email. The news from Kamloops has had Saganash thinking about those friends he lost in the 10 years he spent at La Tuque Indian residential school in Quebec. And Canada, they have said, is doing precious little about it. ![]() Indigenous people, especially those who survived the schools, have known for years that unmarked graves of their relatives dot the country. Photograph: Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images Autumn Peters places 215 ribbons on the fence behind the former Kamloops Indian residential school this week, in honor of the 215 children whose remains have been discovered buried near the facility, as well as her grandfather Clayton Peter, a survivor of the school, and all other survivors. ![]()
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