More children are being found in unmarked graves around residential school sites. Just this week, the Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan found 751 children at the old Marieval residential school. It’s enough to break your heart.
Ken Watts, the elected chief of the Tseshaht First Nation near Port Alberni, said he gets at least one call every day from someone who might know where more children are buried.
Since the unmarked graves were discovered in Kamloops last month, the federal government has pledged $27 million to help nations find children who never came home from residential schools.
There are 139 recognized residential schools in Canada. If that $27 million was split up equally, the Tseshaht would get less than $200,000.
“It’s probably not going to be enough to do it right,” Watts told Ha-Shilth-Sa.
“We need to hear the stories, do the scanning, come back with a report, determine next steps and make sure it’s all grounded in our culture,” he said.
“It’s not just running a machine through our territory.” Searching for buried children is emotionally difficult. “It’s cleansing the space and cleansing the people that go in to do that work so they don’t have that negative energy on them.”
The Tseshaht never gave anyone permission to put the Alberni Indian Residential School on their territory. But Watts said they now “have a responsibility to support [the families] to get the answers they need and deserve.”
“A lot of people knew about the abuse,” said Watts. “People knew that a lot of children didn’t make it home.”
“But these aren’t just stories anymore. This is real. This is solid evidence that the horror stories they say are true.”
