One of Canada’s most tragic stories is the residential school system where children from Indigenous communities were taken from their families to attend residential schools often located thousands of kilometres away. There, the children were forced to forget their culture and traditions.
The Canadian government believed it was responsible for educating and caring for Aboriginal people in Canada. It thought their best chance for success was to learn English and adopt Christianity and Canadian customs.
The schools operated between the 1870s and 1990s.
If Canada had a Hollywood, at least a dozen films would have been made about this incredibly shameful time in the country’s history.
Now, a very dark period in Canada’s history is becoming a wee bit brighter. It will take, however, much more action to move toward rectifying a horrible wrong.
On Tuesday, the Honourable Ralph Goodale, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, announced the transfer of a Regina Indian Industrail School (RIIS) cemetery from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the RIIS Commemorative Association.
In this cemetery, more than 35 children from Indigenous communities were buried in unmarked graves. They died in a residential school. In some cases, two or three children are buried in one grave.
Only one gravesite in this cemetery is marked — infants of the school’s former headmaster.
According to documents obtained by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, within the first six years of operation, 48 students died at the RIIS. It is estimated that 20 percent of RIIS students died (many from tubercular diseases) while at school or shortly after being discharged.
RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki transfers RIIS cemetery to Commemorative Association. Photo: RCMP.
The school, which opened in 1891 and closed in 1910, was operated by the Presbyterian Church of Canada through the Foreign Mission Committee. It was built about six kilometres northwest of Regina.
More than 500 First Nations and Métis children from 43 Indigenous communities across Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta were sent to the school, ranging in age from three to their early twenties.
After the RIIS closed in 1910, the building served as a jail, and then a juvenile home for boys. A fire destroyed the building in 1948.
From 1911 to 1985, the land was owned by multiple government entities until the Saskatchewan Economic Development Corporation and the RCMP completed a land exchange to straighten the southern boundary. The cemetery property was subsequently sold to private individuals.
The cemetery land has now been transferred from its most recent private owners to the RCMP, in exchange for an equivalent adjacent parcel of vacant Crown land.
The Tuesday ceremony included Min. Goodale, RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki, Longman, elders and Indigenous community leaders, and descendants of the students.
In August 2018, a plaque was unveiled to honour and commemorate the students buried in the cemetery. Between 2014 and 2017, four annual walks and feasts were held to honour the students buried in the cemetery.
Genealogists will hope the remains of the children will be identified through DNA tests and headstones will be erected. These actions won’t right the many wrongs. But they will provide some solace to the relatives of those poor children.
