Indigenous People: Canadians in Search of their Buried History
Passers-by across Canada hung up children's clothes or put on pairs of shoes to remember the thousands of Indigenous youth who never found their parents at the end of the school year.
© RFI / Pascale Guéricolas
Text by: Pascale Guéricolas
8 mins
For months, discoveries in ancient cemeteries have rekindled painful memories for Indigenous people in Canada.
The opportunity for the rest of the population to become aware of a reality long hidden from history books and collective memory.
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From our correspondent in Montreal,
Between 1880 and 1997, around 150,000 indigenous people had to leave their territory and their families, forcibly schooled in boarding schools run by religious congregations. This assimilation movement decided by the governments of the time aimed to "
kill the Indian in the child."
"Torn overnight from their nomadic way of life, often malnourished, victims of aggression or childhood illnesses of the time, nearly 6,000 of these children would never have found their parents at the end of the period. school year.
Traces of this buried history are emerging today thanks to new technology. The use of geo-radars, whose waves penetrate the ground, makes it possible to locate the remains of bodies buried without burials. On May 27, the Tk'emlups te Secwépemc Nation in British Columbia discovered what looked like nearly
200
unidentified
graves
near a former residential school, open from 1890 to 1969. A few days later, the community Coweness, Saskatchewan, in Western Canada, detects the presence of
751 graves
, still near a boarding school. In all, traces of 1,300 graves emerge at several sites.
From then on, the media machine got carried away, and Canadians became aware of a past of which the majority were unaware. In solidarity, several cities are canceling national holiday activities on July 1. Justin Trudeau, visibly moved,
demands
an official apology from the Pope for these unexplained deaths. A gesture that arouses mixed reactions. "
When the Prime Minister comes to cry in front of the cameras, it annoys me,"
exclaims anthropologist Marie-Pierre Bousquet, director of the program in native studies at the University of Montreal.
Experts did a colossal job in 2015 and wrote a report for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Asking for an apology from the Pope was already among the recommendations.
So why were they not followed?
"
Chronic indifference
This question is also asked by residential school survivors. With tears in their voices, hundreds of them told the Commission from 2008 to 2015 the circumstances surrounding the loss of a brother, a sister, a cousin. They also confided in the traumatic consequences on their adult life of this tearing away from their loved ones and their culture, which often resulted in alcoholism, drugs, loss of meaning. Except that their stories have clearly not shaken the wall of indifference that surrounds the natives in Canada. Even within the communities, some choose to keep silent these memories which still cause them terrible nightmares 40 or 50 years later.
Jean-Guy Pinette testifies to his life at the boarding school in front of the fence which shelters this site and on which passers-by have hung children's clothes to recall the memory of the deceased. © RFI / Pascale Guéricolas
“
Young people need to know what happened here,
” says Jean-Guy Pinette. A proud member of the Innu nation, this spiritual worker lives a few hundred meters from the site of a former boarding school, in Mani-u tenam near Sept-Îles, in eastern Quebec. At the age of seven, he followed the parish priest who offered him "
a little walk
". Ultimately, the alleged ride lasted eight years. It also caused him deep suffering, which brought him to the brink of suicide. "
It is important that the children and grandchildren of former residents hear their story," continues
the sixty-year-old.
This will help them understand why they consume alcohol or sometimes find it difficult to show affection to their loved ones by hugging them.
"
With his eyes fixed on the grassy field where the foundations of the buildings where the girls and boys lived until 1972 are buried, Mr. Pinette remembers a rally organized in 2013. The former residents gathered around the remains of 'a building linked to the boarding school, where children were allegedly sexually assaulted.
“
We cried together, but we also gave each other love and strength,”
recalls the speaker.
I hope we can make a big circle here, tell our story, eating our traditional dishes together.
"
A huge amount of research
Over the next few months, the Uashat-Mani-u tenam Band Council is considering organizing searches, like other organizations across Canada.
Research that will take time, and especially a lot of money, warns anthropologist Marie-Pierre Bousquet, who edited a book on the history of residential schools in Quebec.
“We
will have to explore the archives of religious congregations to find the trace of missing children,”
explains the researcher.
Most of the time, these are private archives, scattered all over the place and very often unclassified.
Even though big data processing software is now available, a lot of these boxes are not even indexed.
"
This exploration of the archives is complementary to the excavations carried out by detection instruments, because it makes it possible to delimit the sites likely to shelter the remains of the bodies of children.
Subsequently, the communities will have to decide whether DNA research will be carried out to find the parentage of the children buried, or what type of burial will shelter them for their final rest.
Difficult questions, which torment a Canadian society increasingly aware that
reconciliation
with the indigenous peoples will take time.
→ Listen again on RFI: They were "victims of violent integration policies"
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