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n January 25, leaders of the T’exelc people, of the Secwepemc nation, summoned the media to announce preliminary results of the search for clandestine burials that they have been carrying out for nine months now. They opened the conference with words and prayers from three older women, singing and remembering the children who were forced to attend San José Mission School and never returned home.
Kukpi7 leader Willie Sellars opened the press conference with sober words, explaining that the community decided to organize to search for possible remains of children irregularly buried by the religious who took charge of the San José Mission School. This school – which was actually a boarding school – opened outside the town of Williams Lake, in the province of British Columbia, in 1891, and operated for 90 years. It closed in 1981.
Last May they made the decision to start a comprehensive search strategy, after the leader of Tk’emlups te Secwepemc announced that they had evidence of 215 children buried clandestinely on the grounds of the Kamloops Boarding School for Indians, according to Kukpi7 Sellars. Such boarding schools, called Residential Schools in English, they were built throughout Canada, and were operated by Christian groups from the 1970s until 1996.
By then six years had passed since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on these internees (TRC, for its acronym in English) collected testimonies from more than 6,500 survivors and their families.
For more than a century, the central goals of indigenous policy in Canada were to eliminate indigenous governments; ignore indigenous rights; terminate treaties and, through a process of assimilation, cause indigenous peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious and racial entities in Canada
clarifies the first of the six volumes produced by the TRC, published in 2015. This report described the boarding school system as a cultural genocide against indigenous peoples.
The following year, the TRC published a confirmed estimate that at least 3,200 boys and girls died in boarding schools, most of their bodies never returned to their communities. After the announcement of Tk’emlups te Secwepemc last year, hundreds more burials have been detected by various indigenous peoples in Canada.
For nearly a century, the boarding school at Williams Lake was operated by Christian groups, mostly by the Roman Apostolic Church and its priests and sisters draped in their black cassocks with prominent crosses on their chests.
Kukpi7 Sellars detailed how, over the course of the investigation, they found evidence that the interned children had endured torture, sexual abuse, rape, starvation, and outbreaks of diseases such as tuberculosis, influenza, and meningitis.
In 1902, the boy named Duncan Sticks tried to run away from boarding school. Shortly after he was found dead. The Canadian government launched an official investigation and found dire conditions. But nothing changed.
In 1920, 18 years later, nine children attempted suicide by drinking citusa elixir. One, named Augustine Allan, died. Kukpi7 Sellars said white people knew what was going on at Williams Lake boarding school. But nothing changed.
The Williams Lake First Nation search process began with interviews with survivors and witnesses who knew of the boarding school. These interviews served as clues for geophysical studies of the terrain.
Using state-of-the-art technologies, including airborne and horizontal remote sensing, ground-penetrating radar, and magnetronomy, they detected 93 possible positives. More than half were found outside the pantheon built by the religious on the boarding school grounds.
The results are still preliminary: of 470 possible hectares of revision, so far only 14 have been combed. But they are also preliminary because, according to the person in charge of the investigation, the only way to have absolute certainty is through exhumation.
Kukpi7 Sellars emphasized the fact that there are boys and girls who were disappeared from the Williams Lake boarding school. Some of these bodies were cremated, others dumped in rivers or lakes. For these children and their families, our deepest mourning
he pointed.
The main intention of the governments with the internees was to have access to our territories, access to all our resources
Charlene Bellieu stated, before issuing a healing chant after the announcement. But they didn’t win. We are here. And as Kukpi7 Willie said, we will prosper, for the pain we’ve been through
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* Canadian journalist and author of Anti-Drug Capitalism and Neoliberal War: Disappearance and Search in Northern Mexico
