60 Minutes - 2/6/2022: Death in Training, Breaking Point, Canada's Unmarked Graves

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

On this week's "60 Minutes," there's an ongoing problem with military service members. As Lesley Stahl reports, they are being killed -- not in combat -- but in vehicular accidents during training. Covid hospitalizations and staff shortages are pushing healthcare workers to to the brink. Sharyn Alfonsi reports. Last year, when archaeologists detected what they believed to be 200 unmarked graves at an old school in Canada, it brought new attention to one of the most shameful chapters of that nation’s history. , Anderson Cooper reports on the residential schools of Canada, where more than 150,000 indigenous children were sent after being forcibly removed from their communities. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver. 60 Minutes has been looking into an alarming amount of military casualties, not in combat, but in training that involve armored vehicles. What's being done about it? All right, let's go. We found there are solutions, but an important one is stuck between the Pentagon and Congress. Oh my God. We are holding admitted patients in the emergency department for days upon days. So they're just sitting in the ER because there's not a bed? Yes.

We can also pull out bed three, Michelle, if you need that bed. I feel like everybody is in survival mode. Not only just us in the emergency department, I think the whole hospital is. We had an entire wave of nurses and physicians who'd worked for 25, 30, 35 years. They said, I'm done. I'm not going to do this anymore, and they left. I grew up a very, very mean woman because of all what happened to me. You learned that here, you think? Yeah.

She is not the only one. More than 150,000 children were sent to residential schools, which Canada's first prime minister supported to, in his words, sever children from the tribe and civilize them. My name was number 65 for all those years. Just a number? Just a number, yeah. 65, pick that up, stupid, or 65, why'd you do that, idiot? I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill

Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes. Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at Visa.ca slash fintech. Last month, two Marines were killed and 17 injured, not in war, but in transit. Their truck flipped over on a highway outside of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. And it's not as uncommon as you'd think. We found that as a parent or partner of someone in the military,

you're far likelier to get that dreaded call and learn your loved one was killed in an accident rather than in combat. And many, far too many, of the accidents involve armored vehicles during training. First Lieutenant Connor McDowell, a platoon leader in the Marines, was out on a training mission in a light armored vehicle like this at Camp Pendleton, California in May 2019 when he hit an unmarked ditch covered in brush. Describe what happened. He called out to his men, roll over, roll over, roll over.

Pushed his gunner in the turret next to him down under the armor, but he couldn't get himself down in time. And it careened into that ditch, rolled over and crushed him. Conner was Susan Flanagan and Michael McDowell's only child. At first I thought that this was what happens when you train like you mean to fight. But when we went to San Diego to bring him back, I had a couple of idle moments in the hotel. And I googled rollover and military.

And I discovered that at Pendleton, a month before, a Marine raider had died in a rollover. So I googled further back, the army, et cetera, and suddenly I saw a whole series of deaths in rollovers of military vehicles, all kinds, Humvees, light armored vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles. And then I realized this is not a single incident. This is a systemic problem. During training? During training. I can accept people dying in combat, but if you're training in your own country and you're dying needlessly in preventable accidents, this is a massive problem which has to be fixed. To fix it,

McDowell kept digging. And what he uncovered, he says, was so serious and yet so routinely neglected that it led to this scathing report by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found close to 4,000 of these accidents in the Army and Marine Corps from 2010 to 2019, resulting in 123 deaths, nearly two-thirds of which involved rollovers. And shockingly, most occurred in daylight on regular roads, even in parking lots. It's the tragedy of low expectations that it's expected people will die in training. Are you saying that they expect this? What are you saying? It's regarded as that's the price of being a soldier or a Marine.

In training? Yes. Training is dangerous. These things happen. But they don't just happen. The GAO concluded there was often improper supervision, that drivers were poorly trained, and vehicles inadequately inspected. Some accidents involved multiple factors, as was the case with Christopher Bobby Nem, a Navy sailor. These are screams of joy from Bobby's mom, Nancy, when he surprised her one Christmas.

A year and a half later, in the summer of 2020, he and 15 Marines were training off Camp Pendleton in amphibious assault vehicles, or AAVs like these. Giant armored vessels Marines used on both land and sea. His stepdad, Peter Vienna, says the Marines had no business sending out the AAVs used in his son's drill. They're 40 years old, and they were in terrible condition. And instead of asking for better condition AAVs, which there were, there were plenty of them, they had gotten these, all of them that were in poor condition. So they're sitting in a parking lot on Camp Pendleton, baking in the sun.

They're deteriorating. Peter Ostrofsky's son, Jack Ryan, was also on that mission. A week prior to the mission, we were speaking on the telephone, and he made the comment that AAVs sink all the time. They've called them, and he called it a floating coffin. Do you think he was worried? Oh, absolutely. Two AAVs broke down, and their son's designated vehicle sprang an engine leak.

And yet, the mission was not aborted. What was the drive to go forward with faulty equipment they're trying to keep a schedule stay on time the safety of our sons took a second place to completing a training mission this isn't. This isn't got to do it right now. This is training. There should have been an all-stop at many points. But 16 young men crowded into the AAV, as seen in this video that one of the Marines sent his dad. It almost immediately started taking on water, ankle level, calf level, seat level, as one by one, the AAV systems were failing. The communication system was down.

They were in the dark using the lights on their cell phones to try to see. Wait, wait, the lights didn't work? The safety lighting that's supposed to function didn't function. Were there lifeboats? No, so there's supposed to be two safety boats in the water. They went with none. This is the AAV at the bottom of the ocean, an underwater video we obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

Seven men made it out alive. Nine did not. Turns out most had received little or no safety training on how to escape. It doesn't make sense. There's so much of it that doesn't make sense. They were taking on water for 45 minutes, yet they were still found at the bottom of the ocean with all their gear still on, their body armor. And that should have come off. They didn't know what to do.

They were all looking at each other like, what does this mean? What do we do? You know, the Marine Corps did its own investigation, and the Marine Corps concluded that this, and I'm going to use the direct quote, was preventable. The top-down incompetence, the lack of readiness, really the lack of duty of care for our sons. It was shocking.

Can you sue the military or the commanders for what happened? The Ferris Doctrine makes that impossible. The Ferris Doctrine prevents anyone from suing the military for anything that happens to service members on the job, no matter how egregious. The biggest thing for me is these boys were not protected. I have this vision in my head, nightmares of the AAV going down. What was his last word?

This was one of the worst training accidents in Marine Corps history. But accidents keep coming, and the GAO states less serious ones are likely underreported. Christian Avila-Tavarez, an Army combat medic, was on a training drill in 2018 when one vehicle broke down, so his vehicle had to tow it. This is around 1.30 a.m. maybe. It's dark, it's raining, it's muddy. The vehicle that we were towing just slid and hit us, and so we just rolled over. And I was expelled from the vehicle, and then the vehicle just landed on top of me, pinning me down from the waist down. So this giant monster vehicle rolls over on top of me, pinning me down from the waist down. So this giant monster vehicle rolls over on top of you? Yes, on top of me. His left leg had to be amputated above the knee.

The right leg was so badly damaged, he spent the next two years in rehab learning how to walk again. Killing it, bro. Killing it. And we learned there was another rollover during training at that same place, that same day as Avila Tavares's. The Army told us there were fewer vehicle deaths last year, saying most are caused by human error and inexperience. Nearly one in five enlistees joined the Army with no driver's license.

The Pentagon and Marines declined our interview requests, though the new defense budget mandates several new safety provisions, and AAVs will no longer be used in water drills. But there are more steps the military could take that they haven't, involving relatively inexpensive upgrades to the vehicle involved in most accidents, the Humvee. This test footage by IMI, a safety system supplier, shows what can happen inside a Humvee in a rollover. But watch. Drivers could have a better chance when Humvees are retrofitted with IMI's restraints and airbags. One reason there are so many Humvee accidents

is numbers. Over 100,000 are used by the Army alone. Another cause is engineering. Their high center of gravity makes them prone to flip over. And because Humvees were easy targets for IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military added extra armor that made them even less stable. Okay. We were invited by Ricardo Defense, a small military contractor, to suit up for a demo of how unstable these vehicles can be while making turns. All right, let's go. We were going less than 30 miles an hour. The two yellow bars were there to prevent us from actually tipping over.

Oh, my God. Most Humvees do not have anti-lock brakes or electronic stability control that prevent rollovers. But eight years ago, Ricardo developed them for the Humvee. Ricardo's president, Chet Grison. Let's do the same thing with the system on, please. Here it comes. With the system on, all wheels remain firmly on the ground. My goodness gracious.

The system works so well, it's now mandatory in all new Humvees. But what about Humvees already in use? Well, Ricardo came up with a safety kit that could be installed for about $16,000 per vehicle in about 54,000 of the older Humvees. You could make 10 or more old vehicles safer for the price of one new vehicle. And yet the Department of Defense is asking for a lot of money for new Humvees, but only a fraction of what's needed to retrofit old ones. If the budget were to be approved today, as the numbers stand, we would have enough funding for about 545 vehicles. 545 vehicles out of 54,000? That's it? That's it, yeah. And so that's about 1% of the fleet. At that rate, it'll take 100 years to get the fleet fit.

A recent letter to the Pentagon from several congressmen endorses your kit. They calculated that the difference in cost between putting your kit on and building a new vehicle is about $13 billion. It sounds like a no-brainer. Yeah, why wouldn't you do it? Chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, Congressman John Garamendi, told us that Congress and the Pentagon's preference for new over upgrades is often predicated on keeping defense contractors fed. Have you made any move to say nobody should be in a Humvee that doesn't have anti-lock

brakes? We have tried and I have lobbied. We want to increase safety in training because people are dying needlessly in preventable accidents. It won't cost that much, but it's got to be done. And that's for the American people to press their members of Congress. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history.

I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. In much of the country, the number of COVID cases is

falling. The Omicron variant may result in less severe illness, but inside many of the country's hospitals, the work is more demanding than ever. That's largely because, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 400,000 health care workers have left since the start of the pandemic. Last month, hospitals in 18 states reported critical staff shortages, including Kentucky. So two weeks ago, we went to Louisville, a place where the vaccination and infection rate has pretty much mirrored the national average. We saw ERs that were shorthanded and nurses and doctors who were exhausted. After two years of soldiering through COVID,

they told us the pandemic had pushed them and their hospital close to a breaking point. When we arrived in Louisville, ambulances were rushing to hospitals only to wait almost an hour to drop off patients because emergency rooms were full. The hectic pace of treating cardiac cases and accident victims was pushed to new levels by another wave of COVID patients needing treatment. How quickly does it go from busy to insane? A matter of minutes. We can have, you know, no patients signing into triage and then look out there and there's 10. Alyssa Parra is a supervising nurse in the emergency room at the University of Louisville Hospital, one of the largest in the region. The goal is to get his blood pressure under 160.

Parra was one of five employees 60 minutes followed to see how staff shortages were impacting hospitals. We agreed not to identify patients and to stay out of the way. It wasn't easy because patients were parked anywhere there was space. 85 percent of those hospitalized for COVID in Kentucky are not fully vaccinated. We are holding admitted patients in the emergency department for days upon days. So they're just sitting in the ER because there's not a bed? Yes. We can also pull out bed three, Michelle, if you need that bed. I feel like everybody is in survival mode.

Not only just us in the emergency department, I think the whole hospital is. What does that look like when you're trying to survive? What does that mean? How can we take care of patients effectively every single day with the staff that we have? Parra told us her ER had fewer nurses than at any point during the pandemic. Usually, she'll have about a dozen nurses on a shift. But on the day we were with her, she had just nine other nurses

to treat 71 patients in the ER, with 16 more in the waiting room. Have you had nurses quit that work for you? Yes. Tell me about that. You know, some of them have got to a point, you know, where they have stepped away. And, you know, they've, you know, moved on and said, you know, I need a break from this. I, you know, mentally, I just need a break. We just keep putting one foot in front of the other and, you know, trying to take it day by day.

And I just try to bring positive energy every day. How hard is that right now? Difficult. It's getting more difficult each day. The contagiousness of the Omicron variant has stretched the staff further. Last month, 450 employees called in sick on the same day. I've got a meeting with them. Dr. Jason Smith is trying to fill the holes. He's the hospital's chief medical officer and a trauma surgeon. We had an entire wave of nurses and physicians who'd worked for 25, 30, 35 years. They said, I'm done.

I'm not gonna do this anymore. And they left. Somebody quits, it's not like replacing a fry cook. And therein lies the issue. You know, if you think about a nurse, on average, it takes four to five years to train a nurse. It can take eight to 12 years to train a physician or a surgeon. So if you turned on the tap today and said, I'm going to double the amount so that we have enough, we still won't have enough for four or five years. It seems like you're describing a system at its breaking point.

I think we are, and I think that's the biggest worry I have. Are we going to have a system that we can't support after this pandemic is over? What we expect when we come to the hospital is there's going to be a physician, and there's going to be a nurse, and they're going to take care of me. But in the future, that may not look that way. We're going to have to rethink how we care for individuals in the hospital moving forward. Up on the seventh floor, we met Amanda Swinney in the ICU. As a respiratory therapist, her job is to help people breathe. Take a listen to your lungs, okay? Give you a breathing treatment. But over the last two years, she says she's barely had a chance to breathe herself.

On this day, she was darting among 40 patients, almost double her normal workload. When you have a COVID patient who comes in not vaccinated, are you thinking now, like, it didn't have to be this way? I do get a sense of, wow, had you chosen a different route, then we wouldn't be where we are now. It's just frustrating. It's frustrating when there's something out there that can keep you from dying. It can lower your odds of being hospitalized and having severe disease.

I just don't understand why more people don't. Swinney told us that sometimes she feels numb. There's like this thing called compassion fatigue, where, you know, I feel like I gave so much those first like nine months and got so close to so many patients that we lost that now I almost can't do that. It's just too much loss, I guess. Some of the nurses have described it like a war zone, but in a war zone, right, they change out the front line every so often. Right. We can't get away from it. We can't work from home. We can't do virtual. You know, we have to show up. And it's just, it just keeps coming. It just keeps coming. Is this the new reality? I don't know. I'm not sure. I don't know that I could in another year keep up this pace.

Hospitals in Louisville have been working together so they don't have to turn away patients. But staff shortages in other parts of the country have forced health systems to cancel elective surgeries, temporarily close parts of maternity wards, or leave hospital beds empty. Nurses are often the backbone of those hospitals. In a survey last fall, the Kentucky Nurses Association reported one in four nurses said they were likely to quit their job in the next three months. Delanor Manson is the CEO of the association. When you think about nursing as being 53 percent of the healthcare workforce, those are large numbers.

You have to know that there was a nursing shortage prior to the pandemic. The pandemic has ripped off the bandage. They're overworked. They have to do things that it doesn't take a nurse to do. Like what? Baths, walking patients, turning patients. But someone else could do that. It doesn't take a degree or a license to do those things. That work is important for patient care and is usually handled by aides.

Now they're in short supply, too. So in some hospitals, nurses have had to mop floors or empty trash. As soon as you transfer a patient or discharge a patient, it's not five minutes later you're getting another patient. That's a drink and a potty break. Yes, before it's getting discharged. Are you ready to get out of here? Julia Anderson is an ICU nurse. She was just 19 when she began her career in 2020. Anderson had graduated high school early, enrolled in a fast-track training program, and was quickly assigned to treat the sickest COVID patients.

I imagine there's nothing they can teach you in nursing school to prepare you for this moment. No, not at all. I mean, they didn't teach you that you would have to zip up your first body bag. I still remember the first patient's name, the first room, what happened, and everything. And that was hard. The frequency of COVID deaths here has declined, but the stress hasn't. Anderson says nurses are increasingly being confronted by angry patients, some of them enraged by the long waits for care. Last week, I had a patient put her hands on me after cussing me out for probably 10 minutes.

Put her hands on me and pushed me as hard as she could. I've been called every name under the book. You have? Oh, my goodness, yes. In one ear, out the other ear. Really? That doesn't bother you? It used to.

It used to bother me really bad. I mean, I've cried before some of the names I've been called by family members, by patients. But now, I guess I'm immune to it. Does anybody who's not in that room, in that hospital understand truly? I tell my mom all the time, I wish you were a fly on the wall for one shift. But until you can get somebody who goes through it with you and has a patient pass in one room, but then the next patient's on their call light saying, you forgot to bring me my water. You told me you would 45 minutes ago. And you put on a face and you say, yes, ma'am, I'm so sorry. I'll bring you that water, knowing that you are about to cry.

You are about to let it out. But you can't. We got a sense of that when we met Crystal Totten. She works with patients who need ECMO, a machine that oxygenates blood outside the body and is used when lungs are too weak to do the job. Last September, a fellow nurse and friend, Becky Fulks, became one of her patients when Fulks became sick with COVID. I remember just like, you know, just breaking down because seeing somebody at their worst point, you know, not knowing if they're going to live or die is, you know, is very hard. Fulks is a heart and lung nurse.

She was vaccinated and working through the pandemic. She was in bad shape when you saw her? Oh, she, yeah. So for a patient to need to go on ECMO, it's a last-ditch effort. It's a maximum form of life support. Last month, Becky Fulks began to improve. She was taken off the ECMO machine, but still has a tracheostomy tube. It's unclear if the 49-year-old mother of two will ever get back to nursing.

What does Becky's story tell us about all the nurses? It's weird to say she's one of the lucky ones who have fought through this. You're putting yourself and your family at risk, you know, every day to take care of people. Even people who—I've had people look me in the face and tell me it's not real and that they're putting chips in your body. That has to be hard as a nurse. It's really hard. Especially when your friend's down the hall. It's very difficult.

It feels like a slap in the face. This is our story, but you could take this story to New York, Chicago, L.A., Phoenix, Atlanta. You will hear this story at pretty much every hospital, every health care system across the country right now. We invited Dr. Jason Smith's colleagues from the two other large medical systems in Louisville to join our conversation. Dr. Stephen Hester is chief medical officer with Norton Health Care, and Dr. Chuck Anderson is with Baptist Health. Raise your hand if you're hiring at least 50 nurses right now, open positions.

At least 50. If they walk in tomorrow, we'll take them. You'll take them. Right. 100? Yes. Yeah. 150. 150 nurses you're looking for? Yeah. Yeah. Pre-pandemic, I think we all had a buffer. I think our buffer is a fine line right now and that's what's making it difficult. The supply of nursing school graduates is also falling short, leaving hospitals without enough reinforcements. Okay, well, we're going to look at your belly. Although applications to nursing schools are up, record numbers of prospective nurses are being denied admission because there aren't enough instructors. Last year, 1,700 qualified

applicants in Kentucky were turned away from nursing schools because of the lack of teachers. This pandemic will end. All pandemics end. But it's the carry forward from what we're having to do and the amount of human capital that we're burning through right now that are going to impact the health care system for the next two, five, ten years. And a wave of 70 million aging baby boomers is about to flood American health care. Doctors, technicians, and an estimated 270,000 new registered nurses will be needed to help care for them, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why do you think we haven't been talking about what's next? Well, it's a difficult conversation to have. It's not right in front of your face. This is,

what's the chronic problem? How am I going to manage the chronic problem? And in healthcare, managing chronic problems are often much more difficult than the acute problem. What we're seeing now in a pandemic may become an everyday occurrence, and that's not something that we can sustain for decades. Meet Tim's new Oreo mocha ice caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours 200 unmarked graves at an old school in Canada, it brought new attention to one of the most shameful chapters of that nation's history. Starting in the 1880s and for much of the 20th century, more than 150,000 children from hundreds of Indigenous communities across Canada

were forcibly taken from their parents by the government and sent to what were called residential schools. Funded by the state and run by churches, they were designed to assimilate and Christianize Indigenous children by ripping them from their parents, their culture, and their community. The children were often referred to as savages and forbidden from speaking their languages or practicing their traditions. Many were physically and sexually abused, and thousands of children never made it home. The last of Canada's 139 residential schools for Indigenous children closed in 1998. Most have been torn down. But the Muskegon residential school in Saskatchewan still stands. Its windows boarded up, its rooms gutted. A reminder to a nation that would rather forget a three-story tombstone

for generations of children who died here. Sometimes I wish it would be gone for all what happened here. You wish this had been torn down? Yeah. I could hear everything in here, what was done. It lingers. Leona Wolfe, who comes from the Muscalgon Reserve, was five years old, and she says she was taken from her home in 1960. School officials and police would often show up unannounced in indigenous communities and round up children, some as young as three. Parents could be jailed if they refused to hand their children over.

When kids arrived at their schools, their traditional long hair was shaved off. If they tried to speak their language, they were often punished. They put me in a dark room like that. They'd shut the door and then they'd take off the light. All I had to look through was this much light, like I was in jail. She says the abuse many kids in Muskaugen suffered from the Catholic priests and nuns wasn't just physical. Father Joël was fondling the girls here. A priest, Father Joël, was fondling girls? Yeah, this used to be a sickbay. They used to have a bed here.

And he would take girls into the bed? Yeah, my cousin. He took your cousin in here? How old was she? She was only eight. I grew up a very, very mean woman because of all what happened to me. You learned that here, you think? Yeah. She is not the only one.

More than 150,000 children were sent to residential schools, which Canada's first prime minister supported to, in his words, sever children from the tribe and civilize them. For much of the 20th century, the Canadian government supported that mission. This report aired in 1955. They learned not only games and traditions, such as the celebration of St. Valentine's Day, but the mastery of words. The idea for the schools came in part from the United States.

In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania, where this photo was taken of Native American children when they first arrived. This is them four months later. The school's motto was, kill the Indian, save the man. Consequently, ours was kill the Indian in the child. Kill the Indian in the child. That was the guiding principle here in Canada. Chief Wilton Littlechild, whose Cree was six years old

when he was taken to this residential school in Alberta. Then, he says, he was given a new name. My name was number 65 for all those years. Just a number? Just a number, yeah. 65, pick that up, stupid, or 65, why'd you do that, idiot? What does that feel like, at six years old, to be called a number? Well, I think that's where the trauma begins,

not just the physical abuse, psychological abuse, spiritual abuse, and worst of all, sexual abuse. You were sexually abused? Yes. I think that's where my anger began as a young boy. Chief Littlechild says he was able to take some of that anger out on the school's hockey rink. He won a scholarship to university and graduated, eventually going on to a distinguished career in law. But his story is the exception. They didn't kill my spirit, so I'm still Cree.

I'm still who I am. I'm not 65. My name is Maikant Motil. So they didn't kill my spirit. In 2008, after thousands of school survivors filed lawsuits, the Canadian government formally apologized for its policies. It also set up a $1.9 billion compensation fund and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Chief Littlechild helped lead. For six years, the commission heard testimony from survivors across the country. And she put me under water, slapping me and hitting me, slapping me and hitting me and

punching me and punching me and holding me underwater pulling my hair and I thought God she's going to kill me I'm going to die first day of school we as little boys and little girls we lost our innocence. In 2015, the commission concluded what happened was cultural genocide. It identified more than 3,000 children who died from disease due to overcrowding, malnutrition, and poor sanitation, or died after being abused or trying to run away. A government study in 1909 found the death rate in some schools was as high as 20 times the national average. Most schools had their own cemeteries, and sometimes when children died, their parents were never informed.

It's really traumatic for those families who don't know what happened to their child or relative in the schools. Why weren't kids who died at the schools, why weren't they sent home? To save money. Last year, archaeologists detected what they said could be 200 unmarked graves at this former school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Weeks later, a further 751 unmarked graves were detected across from the former Marivelle Residential School on the Cowess's Reserve in Saskatchewan. There was once a Catholic

cemetery here, but the headstones were bulldozed in the 1960s by a priest after a dispute with a former chief. And what were these lists for? A small team of researchers has been trying to discover the names of those children buried here. But for decades, the government and the church have been reluctant to share their records. Chief Cadmus DeLorme is trying to get answers. Do you know that they're all children? We can't verify how much are children. But based on the research we're doing, a lot of them were children that were forced to go to the Maryville Residential School and died in the Maryville Residential School. Chief DeLorme says he hopes to give the unidentified children a dignity in death that they never received in life.

I want to make sure that Canada knows the truth. Because you can't move to reconciliation until you accept the truth. The discoveries of the graves open deep wounds. More than a dozen churches have been vandalized or destroyed, and thousands have marched demanding the Pope apologize and the churches open archives to help identify any missing children.

Indigenous communities across the country have begun conducting their own searches using ground-penetrating radar. We've laid out a number of grids throughout this landscape. Archaeologists Keisha Supernant and Terry Clark say 35 unmarked graves have been discovered at the Muscalgon school. There's something going on there that's not natural. When we were there this past October, they found what appeared to be another. According to survivor accounts, children sometimes had to dig their classmates' graves. The priests or the school officials would force the kids to dig other children's graves. Can you imagine being like 10 or 11 and digging a grave for your classmate?

What that must have been like. Keisha Supernant says the search for unmarked graves will continue for years. This is very emotional work. It's very devastating work. It's heartbreaking for everyone who's involved. You feel that too? I do. Our communities still feel the impacts of these institutions in our everyday lives. We're way overrepresented in child welfare

and adoptions and foster care. We're way overrepresented in the prisons. You can draw a direct line with that to these places and the pain of that that has been passed on from generation to generation. I started school here in 1958. Ed Bitter knows, whose Cree understands that pain. He was eight years old when he was taken to the Muskegon school. His parents lived within sight of the school, and when he tried to run away, he says the priest forced him to kneel on a broom handle for three days.

That's where my house was. I would sit here and wonder why I couldn't be home. That must have been devastating. Yeah. It wasn't only adults he feared. Some students, themselves victims of abuse, preyed on other children. Were you abused here? Yeah, actually in this room here by one of the boys.

In this very room? This very area here. Later, he says he was also sexually molested by a nun. When he left school, he was rudderless and violent and turned to alcohol. When he got married, he says, he didn't know how to show affection. You didn't know what love was? No, no. I never felt it here. I didn't start saying I loved her until we were married about 40 years,

and then I was very careful how I said it. You didn't say to your wife for 40 years that you loved her? Mm-hmm. Yeah. He says his life changed when he began rediscovering his Cree culture. Raising buffalo and sharing traditional knowledge with children brought healing and finally an understanding of the word love. You can say that now? I can say that now. And it feels good. And I still joke with my wife about that.

Don't say that too loud. So you can say it, you just don't want to say it too loud. Yes. Okay. You know what? It's better than nothing. Yes, that's what she says. As for Leona Wolfe, her life and the lives of her children and grandchildren have been plagued by violence and substance abuse. Intergenerational trauma, she says, that began the day her own mother was sent to school at Muskaugen. Did you see the impact of this place on your mom?

Yeah. How? By drinking a lot, being mean to me, and it impacted us, me and my brother and my siblings. What was done to her, she passed on to you. To me. And what was done to you and others here? Was passed on to my children. This is why sometimes I go into my rage of anger and I cry because it was all done to us, all of us. But it's going to stop now. You know, it is. You believe that? I'm breaking the cycle with my great-grandchildren. Hail Mary, full of grace. Leona Wolfe has returned to her traditions as well. Walking the halls of Muskalkin, she began to sing Hail Mary, a prayer she was forced to learn here long ago.

Now she sings it her own way. That's not how you sang it here when you were in school, though, was it? Nope. You made peace with the Virgin Mary by singing that song. Yeah, and I made peace with myself. Next Sunday, while much of the country is cheering on the Bengals or Rams, 60 Minutes Presents will be here to offer cheers of our own. We'll raise a glass to the wine industry,

as changing weather and climate conditions affect how and even where wine grapes are grown. And we'll lift a pint to the once endangered traditional English pub, a cornerstone of British culture now battling back from COVID and near extinction. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand new edition of 60 Minutes.