Front Burner - What's next for the victims of Kamloops Indian Residential School?

Episode Date: July 16, 2021

In late May, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation shocked Canadians with a preliminary finding of unmarked graves near the former site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Yesterday, the nation released more details. An expert said some 200 possible graves have been identified, but added that number might rise since 64 hectares remain unsurveyed and more forensic investigation and excavation work is needed. CBC Vancouver's Angela Sterritt breaks down what we now know — and tells us what's next.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. It's been almost two months now since the come-ups to Shwetmuk First Nation confirmed what their elders and storytellers already knew. On this Monday night calls to search for all lost Indigenous children. The discovery of unmarked graves at a former Kamloops residential school lead to demands for a plan to find all the buried children.

A moment of grief that became a season of reckoning. grief that became a season of reckoning. Outside Manitoba province's legislature in the city of Winnipeg, protesters tore down the statue of Victoria, the British queen who'd ruled over their country in the 19th century. The map of Canada is covered with crime scenes. The unmarked graves that have shocked Canadians are just the tip of the iceberg. Since then, more nations across the country have announced their own findings of unmarked graves.

Some people are pushing for action. We need solid foundation information of what happened to these children. We know what happened to us. They have our story. And others are continuing work they've done for years to make sure that something like this can't happen again. After years of our children being taken and separated from their families, culture, and ultimately their senses of self, we are one step closer to breaking one of the many generational curses that have bind us. Yesterday, to come lips to Schwabmuck First Nation announced their next steps. And today, CBC's Angela Starrett is back with me.

She's a reporter with CBC Vancouver and a member of the Gitxsan Nation. Hi, Angela. Thank you so much for making the time for coming back on the show. Hi, Angela. Thank you so much for making the time, for coming back on the show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me and listening and thinking about this story. Can you tell me what you heard today? Starting with, I guess, what do we know now about how this investigation started? Yeah, so today we heard for the very first time from the ground penetrating radar specialist, that was Dr. Sarah Below from the University of the Fraser Valley. She presented the findings about the Kamloops Indian Residential School grounds. Her experience, I should say, with ground penetrating radar, or GPR, is quite extensive.

She's done that work in Indigenous cemeteries as well as city cemeteries. And she's also located unmarked prisoner of war burials as part of Canada's first national internment operation. So one thing she said at the outset is that remote sensing, such GPR is not necessary in this case to know that children went missing in the Indian residential school context because of the thousands of stories we've already heard from survivors and that is documented by the TRC. So in her work of serving those grounds adjacent to the Kamloops Indian Residential School, she did that work between May 21st and May 24th of this year. She surveyed that area with the cultural guidance of the community. And it was the area that she looked at was 7,000 square meters of land or just under two acres.

That was an area that was once an apple orchard. It's now a heritage park. And that's where Knowledge Keeper's oral history recalled children as young as six years old being woken up in the middle of the night to dig holes in that apple orchard. So part of that oral history that we were talking about and that she talked about that is so critical in these stories. The other reason why they looked at this area was because a juvenile rib bone surfaced in the same area, as well as a juvenile tooth was excavated from a shovel test pit during an impact assessment conducted by Simon Fraser University's Archaeological Department. The juvenile rib surfaced in the same area in the early 2000s

and was brought into the museum by a tourist. And, you know, she mentioned that the juvenile tooth is not, you know, an indicator of loss of life. But given both discoveries, the possibilities cannot be discounted, she said. Right. And this radar technology, you know, it's not perfect. And I also know that there are some misconceptions about how it works. And I just, I wonder too, if you could just tell me a little bit about like how it works and what exactly has been found. Yeah. And I should say

from the beginning too, that this technology has been used a lot in the past in different parts of Canada to do the same thing that Sarah did. She said that GPR is looking for these subsurface anomalies that can identify depth and disturbances. She said while the depths of the burials can change based on age and time of death and the season in which they were dug, typically shallow graves for juveniles and frozen ground prior to mechanical excavation would affect the burial depth. So that was something that she was looking for. And that's something that we saw today in this press conference were these slides showing the depth of these grounds and these spots that she identified. So for the GPR, the total number of burials of missing children at the Kamloops

Indian Residential School landscape is currently unknown as this was of course, as I mentioned before, a preliminary investigation. Her report identifies some of the probable locations and there remains 160 acres that still require surveying before these numbers can actually be finalized. So she said on top of the acres that need to be probed, there still also needs to be a forensic investigation with excavation to be conclusive. What she has found are what could be 200 of what she calls, quote unquote, targets of interest,

of what could be when pieced together with those oral histories indigenous children who never made it home from residential schools. The chief, Cook Peay, Roseanne Casimir, she laid out a plan for what's going to happen now, where they're going next. And what did she say today? Yeah, so a lot of what she mentioned today is this accountability piece. So, you know, she went back again to still there's never been an apology from the highest level of the Roman Catholic Church, you know, the Pope. from the highest level of the Roman Catholic Church, you know, the Pope. One of the things that I found really interesting, what she said, though,

is she kept on reiterating, you know, we are not here for retaliation. She said we are here for truth-telling, to honor the missing children in their care and on their lands, you know, and who have experienced unthinkable circumstances leading to their deaths and whose remains were placed in these potential unmarked graves. She is also calling for, you know, when we're talking about looking ahead, what are the next steps? We talked a little bit about the potential for excavation and forensic investigation. She's also calling for attendance records of the school from the federal government and the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Specifically, the student attendance records that were created by the institutions that were administered the Kenlips Indian Residential School.

Those primary documents currently within the custody of the Canadian government will be of critical importance to identify those lost children. Every student who ever attended Kenilas Indian Residential School is documented in those records. She also talked about the government needing to provide long-term funding for community members to find the missing children. We know the British Columbia government has allocated 12 million dollars to support First Nations across this province with investigative work at former residential school sites and part of the funding will be to hire experts and putting

together oral tellings from survivors who have come forward to express interest in sharing experiences and truths linked to the deaths to light and peace to family members of the missing children. This is what drove us. And the oral testimony project that I just outlined, that will be overseen by the woman who runs the Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, Mary Ellen Terpelafond. Okay. And I want to talk about the survivors in just one moment. But these attendance records that the chief was talking about, that they're requesting from the federal government, do we know if these attendance records even exist anymore? I know that we've talked on the show before

about how documents related to residential schools have been destroyed. Yeah, we know that there are a lot of records out there that have not been handed over or are still being considered by these religious entities, whether they're going to be handing them over or not. Some of the reasons they provided of why they have not yet handed them over, one of the reasons that I was given was that they said some of the documents,

that could be even attendance documents, have unrelated information within those documents. So, for example, there might be non-residential school survivors' names on there, like visitors to the schools. We've also heard that they may include private information about the nuns, including what could be disciplinary records. We've also heard that some of the records were destroyed in things like fires. And to a large degree, we've heard that a lot of the records will were just not kept. This will be, of course, critical information for those who are missing loved ones or who have been searching for those records for decades. And definitely, I should say that I've been provided documents and people have told me that they have

documents in their possession. And some of those documents that I'm reviewing right now do include attendance records and found in places where they should not be kept. So a lot of information I know is out there that is not being kept in a safe place. Okay, wow. You know, Angela, I know you're just reviewing that right now, but when you're ready to talk about it, I hope that we can do that as soon as you're able. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National

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To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. We heard from a couple of people today who lived through this. What did they say? I was ashamed to be a survivor. That's what residential schools taught me, That's what residential schools taught me, to be ashamed of my identity. Yeah, the survivors today, you know, really talked about the horrors of residential school, not being allowed to make contact with their parents, even through letters, having their identity stripped away. We heard from one survivor who talked about, you know, in school learning, and this kind of goes to my experience too and probably yours and many others learning every single dance of every single culture except for our own indigenous cultures because it was shameful and it was wrong really this notion of taking the indian out of the child but one thing that one of the elders said is it didn't work because we're still here today. The residential schools

were specifically built to take the Indian out of us, to take away our language, culture, and traditions, but it did not work. and we heard from Kamloops Indian Residential School survivor Evelyn Camille who talked about how important it was to tell the truth today you know she said during the residential school settlement the survivors told you know said. There were many children missing. You know, she talked about many, she knows and she remembers many children trying to cross the river, trying to escape residential school and never reached home. And that was something that was very hard for me and for many others to watch. During our residential school settlement, we had tried to mention over and over and over. There are many children missing who did not reach home. Many ran away.

And in that river, we know where the Kamloops Indian Residential School is. Many of our children tried to cross the rivers to swim across. Many were lost in the waters. My oldest sister, Irene, used to talk about them. Those children did not reach home. Angela, back to Evelyn. When I was listening to her today, at one point she talked about

what she wanted to see done at the grave site at the Kamloops former residential school. And she said that she doesn't want the site disturbed. But that does seem like it could run counter, right, to an effort to document and identify all the children who died, at least if excavation was part of that process, as we've just talked about. And so I suppose this does really underscore just how complicated and difficult this all is, hey? Yeah. Yeah, and when I was listening to her, that actually was not uncommon to a lot of perspectives of elders that I've heard. Even I spoke to an elder quite a few years ago, we were just talking about something completely different,

but it involved an excavation of bodies in the Nishka community, and very similar to what Evelyn was saying, they don't believe in touching the bodies. And it's a very spiritual thing. And it's a cultural thing. It's not something you do. And so I think what it underscores for me is that all of this will be done in consultation with a community and will take time, right? So I think it'll be difficult for this process to be rushed. People will need to be consulted. People will need to have their respected perspectives shared and taken seriously. And what does it mean, you know, when she said she would like to go to the grave site, but she can't because she was saying that they're all, there's tape outlined there and you're not allowed to cross,

you're not allowed to disturb, but she wants to go and pray. And so definitely, I think this really speaks to the community having numerous different perspectives. I imagine that there's family members who want nothing more than to find a way to identify if one of the children or many of the children there belong to their family and how to find their resting place. So a very traumatic process that I'm sure will be done with cultural protocols in mind, with care and consideration of everyone who will be affected in the community. Since Kamloops, we've heard about preliminary reports of unmarked graves at several institutions across the country now, even one on Vancouver Island just this week. And many Canadians have been shocked at the deep extent of this. And I wonder, what's it been like to see that when you've been reporting and covering residential schools for so long? I mean, one of the things that I've found quite surprising is the shock all over again, right? Because I remember in 2016, I was in Toronto and doing live hits about this and talking about cultural genocide, talking about genocide. And I'm a bit miffed, I think, because like I said,

it's like I've already reported on this, but for some reason, the science, people need the science. And for some reason, we trust science more than people's stories. And that's been the hardest part of the story is for survivors never to be believed over and over and over again. And that's what was really such an important experience for survivors in 2016 was to finally feel believed that they even survived residential school. Now there's this piece of the story. And for whatever reason, maybe it's just that we've had all these conversations about institutional racism that we're able to accept it. But for whatever reason, I feel this, when I first started reporting on this piece of the story a month ago, I was wondering, what is this going to do to the psyche?

Are Canadians just going to feel sorry for us? Or is this going to lead to another stereotype? Like, oh Canadians just going to feel sorry for us? Or is this going to lead to another stereotype? Like, oh, they're all traumatized. Don't worry. They're just all traumatized. But I do feel something very different. You know, I'm, I'm light skin. Sometimes I can pass for several different races. But if I wear my my indigenous jewelry, people recognize me. And sometimes I'll walk into a place with that and it's like oh crap or a shirt or something why did I wear this today and now I have to go into this business and I'm gonna have to deal with this um and since this happened I've

I've felt that and then I go into the space and I notice people look at me very differently like hello just like I recognize you and it's not in any stereotype but it's just hi it's very strange because when this first all started and I saw the ribbons in the place where I live the orange ribbons and the shirts I thought oh goodness like here we go with this symbology and it'll be nothing more than that but I feel a shift and I feel like I hope this lasts. And I hope people reflect, do a lot of reflecting and understanding the start of change happening at other levels too, on the political level, for example? at other levels too, on the political level, for example?

Yeah. One of the things that I found interesting about this is we heard Justin Trudeau put the flags in Ottawa at half mass, and we heard that all over the country. And we saw pictures of him holding a teddy bear and stuff like this. I just learned today that Roseanne Casimir, and stuff like this. I just learned today that Roseanne Casimir, Cookby Roseanna Casimir, said that Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, has still not reached out to the community or visited the community.

And that was very interesting for me. We've heard British Columbia, the province, putting this money towards finding the missing children and resources to ensure that happens, same as the federal government reiterating funding that they had given previously. But I do feel like this is a priority, but it's hard to tell where exactly that they're taking that priority. I wonder if before we go today, if I could just ask you like a personal question,

you know, when you feel like now you're walking into like a store and you feel like people are seeing you as like a human, like you mentioned, just what what what does that make you feel like because i guess the flip side of that is that you felt like people weren't looking at you like a human before sorry i'm getting choked up a bit it it reminded me of when we had a reckoning in media and i felt like people said oh my my goodness, we've been failing Indigenous people in our stories for so long and including you by calling you an advocate or, you know, not a serious journalist just because you cover Indigenous stories as an Indigenous reporter. And when I've been experiencing this feeling of like real curiosity and interest and respect and I just want to learn but not like I want to extract from you but I

just want to learn and do better it's felt like a huge relief off my shoulders like when I walk into a store I don't have to you, you know, hold that armor up so strong. Any space that I go into, I can just feel like, oh my god, these people are okay with me being in their space. because Indigenous people are from this land. We shouldn't have to feel like aliens in our own world or that we are a threat or that we are not welcome here. Like it's so twisted and so hurtful and harmful. And so this change, which I'm hoping will last, feels like a burden, a huge burden taken off my shoulders where it's like, okay, you just take that armor off for just a moment and do my job and live my life. Another elder said to me yesterday,

the portal has been open and it can't close now. And these stories are going to keep on coming out and the truth cannot be taken back now. It's out and people can deny, you know, people also denied the Holocaust. So there will be those people who refuse to believe the harms of colonization, but I truly do feel a lot of hope for the first time in my life that things are really changing. And that's a big deal. And a big thing for a jaded journalist to say is that she feels that there is some hope and some important work that's being done and that will continue to be done. Angela, thank you. Thank you. I am so grateful and incredibly

honored to call you a colleague. Amia, thank you so much from my heart. It goes right back to you. I have so much respect for you and for this program and shedding a light on this important story. All right, so before we let you go today, former Chief of Defence Staff Jonathan Vance has been criminally charged with obstruction of justice. You might remember that there has been a reckoning in the armed forces over sexual misconduct at the highest levels, one that Vance was at the center of. It was during the military police investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct against Vance that this obstruction from Vance is alleged to have occurred.

Vance has denied all allegations of sexual misconduct. All right, that is all for this week. Frontburner is brought to you by CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced this week by Elaine Chow, Imogen Burchard, Katie Toth, Ali Janes, and Sundas Noor. Our sound design was by Derek Vanderwyk and Mackenzie Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Chavison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Front Burner is Nick McCabe-Locos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and we will see you on Monday. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.