Interim report reveals ‘common concerns’

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2023 (844 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Halfway through her mandate, Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Kimberly Murray promised that her interim report would list some “common concerns” emerging from residential school survivors, Indigenous leaders and researchers struggling to find missing residential school children.

Since the May 2021 discovery of 215 potential unmarked burial sites at the former Kamloops Indian Residential school, more than 4,000 “anomalies” suggesting unmarked gravesites have been found by ground penetrating radar at 16 former residential schools.

The search is not as simple as grabbing a shovel and digging, though.

“Barriers and gaps are making search-and-recovery work particularly difficult,” Murray writes, pointing out that Canada’s legal system is “a confusing, overlapping and sometimes conflicting framework of laws, regulations and policies” that inhibit attempts to find missing residential school students.

Sacred Responsibility interim report

 

Murray points to provincial governments as some of the most challenging entities to deal with.

One of the worst culprits is Premier Heather Stefanson’s government, which has not responded to Murray’s calls in February for access to records and information-sharing.

Murray also identifies 12 other common concerns: access to and the destruction of school records; gaining access to sites; the complexity of ground searches; shortcomings of investigation processes; affirming Indigenous data sovereignty; community responses to media; an increase in the violence of denialism; lack of adequate funding; Indigenous health supports; repatriation of lost children; repatriation of Indigenous land; and, finally, accountability.

Her report makes 48 specific recommendations for change.

Most striking is how all these barriers were first mentioned by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report. In fact, Murray’s report suggests that the TRC’s concerns have grown.

While privacy and access to information laws make research very slow, Murray finds that governments and non-governmental organizations often “hide behind” policy and roadblock search attempts. For instance, when school attendance records are lost, other means such as Treaty Annuity records could be used, but searchers are denied access.

Murray also points out there is a lack of transparency and information on how to access records among government departments and churches; long delays before access to archives is granted; preposterous fees to access archives and photographs; and a looming deadline, because the Supreme Court has ordered survivor accounts made to the TRC during the independent assessment process — which contains crucial information regarding attendees and violence that was witnessed — will be destroyed on Sept. 19, 2027.

There is also an issue with accessing potential burial sites. “In some cases, private or corporate landowners are denying survivors and families access to the lands,” Murray states.

Murray identifies that, at minimum, search-and-recovery work is likely to span over a decade but could be faster if Indigenous communities and power brokers worked together.

This is why Indigenous communities must lead data collection and have “data sovereignty.”

The most alarming barrier to the work of finding lost children at residential schools, though, is the “increase in the violence of denialism” which has become “prolific and takes place via email, telephone, social media, op-eds and, at times, through in-person confrontations.”

“Most recently, denialists are attacking the credibility of survivors’ truths about missing children, unmarked burials, and cemeteries at Indian Residential Schools as sensationalist,” Murray writes.

“They claim that survivors are lying, exaggerating or misremembering what happened because such atrocities could never have occurred in Canada. They characterize the existence of unmarked burials to be ‘fake news’, despite the fact that these are well documented in Vol. 4 of the TRC Final Report.”

She calls on non-Indigenous peoples to actively work to counter denialism through strategies and work, public education on residential schools and “legal mechanisms to address denialism, including the implementation of both civil and criminal sanctions.”

As someone who, alongside family members, is regularly harassed, stalked and abused by individuals denying the abuse, violence and genocide that occurred at residential schools, this last call hits home the hardest.

Denialism is a non-Indigenous problem and Indigenous peoples shouldn’t bear the weight of teaching denialists basic truth and facts that atrocities occurred in Canada.

Murray’s most important message in her interim report, though, is that the inhibition, stifling and denial of searches for lost children at residential schools not only denies the findings of the TRC and the Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls but undermines and breaks international and Canadian law.

This month represents two years since the Canadian government committed to Bill C-15 and the implementation of the 46 articles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into Canadian law.

For the integrity of the country, we must find our missing children.

“This requires new legislation, regulations, policies, and legal and procedural protections,” Murray writes. “We are accountable to these children, and we must fight for justice for them… and work together to bring them home.”

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca