A Visit to a Mass Grave

Prospect Cemetery, Toronto. The last known resting place of two young boys called Alfred and Bruce

Yesterday I visited a mass grave here in my hometown.

Yes, despite the qualms many Canadians have in accepting that this term belongs in a conversation about residential schools, there is one such grave at the Prospect Cemetery in Toronto. In a tuberculosis outbreak in 1941, several children died at the same time and were buried in a single grave.

As the Special Interlocutor explains in her Final Report on Missing and Disappeared Children, in that year two boys named Alfred and Bruce fell ill at the school they were forced to attend in northern Ontario. We believe one of them was seven, we don’t know the age of the other. They were sent to the Toronto Hospital for Consumptives. When the boys died, they were not returned to their communities, but buried in the nearby cemetery.

At that time, when it came to First Nations children, these decisions about where to transfer children, and where to bury them were taken without the knowledge or consent of families or communities.

The definition of a mass grave is when a multitude of bodies are found together, buried in circumstances of dubious legitimacy.  The systematic separation of children from their parents, the failure to return sick children to their families to heal them and keep other children safe from infection, the decision to bury children without involving families or communities in that decision – these were not legitimate practices even by the standards of the day.  Alfred and Bruce suffered this fate only because they were First Nations.

Why does it matter whether or not we acknowledge the presence of mass graves in Canada? As Kimberly Murray puts it, “people whose humanity and dignity are minimized in life are more likely to have their humanity and dignity disregarded in death.”

As I wandered through the open grassy areas where Alfred and Bruce lay buried commingled with the remains of many others, I thought about the two seven-year-old boys.  Honouring them won’t bring them back to life. But it is never to late to acknowledge their humanity and their dignity.