Survivors gather at former residential school site near Brandon

BRANDON — Marjorie Prince had tears in her eyes as she searched to find her and her brothers’ names among more than 3,000 orange flags pegged in the ground at the site of the former Brandon Indian Residential School.

The flags represent children who never returned home as well as survivors.

The woman from Dakota Tipi First Nation said it was her second time returning to the site since she was taken from her family at seven years old with her three brothers.

She couldn’t recall what year she attended the school or how long she was there.

Prince said she remembers looking out for her brothers’ safety.

“I wanted to look after them all the time. I couldn’t because I was in a dorm locked up, and I could hear them yelling,” she said.

“They’d say they want to go home. ‘You want to go home?’ I said, ‘Well, we can’t go home. We have to wait for Mom and Dad to come.’ And then my mom and dad hardly came.”

Prince said she and her brothers were in a foster home before they reconnected with their parents.

“We had people that were mean people that didn’t really care about us, and they did a lot of things to us. They really didn’t look after the kids,” Prince said.

The site of the school, which operated from 1895 to 1972, is roughly five kilometres northwest of Brandon. On Wednesday, a ceremony was held to mark the National Day of Action for Residential School Searches and Healing.

The day of action coincided with the fifth anniversary of Tkemlúps te Secwepemc First Nation’s announcement that ground-penetrating radar had found more than 200 anomalies that could be unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops, B.C., Indian Residential School.

The preliminary findings ignited a nationwide movement of searches at residential school sites across the country.

Brandon’s ceremony included an opening prayer, drumming, stories from survivors and speeches from members of the group investigating missing children from the Brandon residential school — an initiative led by Sioux Valley Dakota Nation.

Christopher Mancuso, a geophysical scientist who works on the investigation, said his work is personal.

Mancuso, who is from Sioux Valley Dakota Nation, said his grandmother attended the residential school in Brandon from the 1930s to the ’40s.

“What goes through my mind when we make these discoveries is, ‘Was this something my grandmother witnessed at that time?’” he said.

Since 2021, the investigation has been searching for unmarked graves, which are identified through archival research, non-invasive geophysical surveying, forensic scene searches and survivor testimonies, Mancuso said.

“The archival evidence has revealed, at this time, 113 names of children who perished at the Brandon residential school,” he said.

Some of the children have been buried in the Turtle Crossing Campground and at a cemetery further up the hill from where the school used to be.

The remaining children are documented as deceased, but their burial grounds are unknown, he said.

“This is where we get to the geophysical search … and so that has revealed a number of unmarked graves — some in the extension of the cemetery and some in other locations that we’re working on finalizing now,” Mancuso said.

“We’ve made a lot of progress, but … we need at least five more years of continued funding to do this.”

The federal government has given Sioux Valley nearly $5 million for the initiative, the government’s website says.

The group is pushing for Ottawa to provide continued funding for searches and Indigenous-led healing supports.

The Brandon Sun reached out to Rebecca Alty, the federal minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, on Wednesday, but her office said she was unavailable.

Mancuso said funding for their work has been year-to-year and “clouded in uncertainty,” but a commitment to multi-year funding would allow archive experts and technicians to continue their efforts.

“The search itself is healing for the survivors. They’ve been telling us for a long time that there are children buried at these schools, and we’re finally in a position to be able to try to help them,” Mancuso said.

Children who attended Brandon’s residential school were taken from Sioux Valley and communities in northern Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

— Brandon Sun