Put Disappeared Children at the Heart of Canada’s Efforts

At the National Gathering on Unmarked Graves, October 30, 2024 (photo by Ben Rowswell)

Survivors of the residential school system have given Canadians a gift. These victims of an attempted genocide have now told the society that made the attempt how we can make amends.

In the three years since systematic searches of the grounds of residential schools began, survivors have met to trade updates and share experiences in a series of National Gatherings. It will take many more years to track down what happened to thousands of children who disappeared while attending these schools, as communities painstakingly review records, conduct searches, and collect memories of those that didn’t come home.

On October 29, the Special Interlocutor who convened these gatherings, Kimberly Murray, delivered her conclusions in a Final Report on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves. The report grounds Canada’s obligations in international human rights law and sets out a path to justice – a path that lies through the search for every single missing child.

Non-Indigenous Canadians have felt deeply conflicted about this legacy since reports of child burials in Kamloops attracted national attention in 2021. For those of us that recognize the harm done in our name, many wonder what is expected of us. 

I came to Gatineau on Tuesday to hear the answer.  Even before Murray took the stage, the physical layout of the room already provided it.  At the very centre of the stage stood an empty chair decorated with a blanket and covered with offerings. The message: we must put the children who died in these schools at the heart of this debate.

When some Canadians insist on seeing proof that children died by the thousands, they place themselves at the heart of the debate. When they argue about which adjective should precede the word “graves” – should we say “mass” or “unmarked”? – they turn this into a question of their own guilt or innocence.

In contrast, Kimberly Murray’s report is a model of moral clarity. Canada used schools as a principal instrument to meet its objective of “ending the Indian problem,” in the words of infamous Indian Affairs bureaucrat Duncan Campbell Scott. In so doing, Canada placed children in harm’s way – isolating them from their families and communities, confining them to institutions deliberately run to lower medical, hygienic and nutritional standards, and denying them accountability when staff abused students physically, emotionally and sexually. They died at far higher rates than students of non-Indigenous schools, and were buried in cemeteries included in the original design of these schools. Inadequate attempts were made to inform parents, to comfort peers, and to maintain records of who was buried where.

If Canada committed genocide through the systematic neglect and abuse of children, we can start to address the damage by caring about these same children.

Putting these children first today would change the debate in Canada.

When we place these children first, we allow ourselves to feel the pain of their deaths. We cease being bystanders.  Sharing the pain opens us up to a new relationship with the communities that suffered their loss.

When we place these children first, we take notice of the nations they belong to. The same nations that residential schools were designed to erase continue to exist despite it all.  When we start to care about these children we start to care about the nations with which we share this country.

Finally, when we place these children first, we want to know the truth. What were their names? What happened to them? Where are they buried?

Through Murray’s exhaustive report, survivors have given us the gift of the memory of their peers that did not. That memory provides a foundation on which we can build a country that protects all children, that preserves the cultures and languages they inherit, and that provides a home for all the nations to which these children and ours belong.