This weekend we saw an amazing outpouring of kindness, empathy and camaraderie in Inuvik as people gathered for a Memorial Walk for children who did not make it out of the Residential School system alive.
It was a push from the community to help genocide survivors cope with resurging memories that we can only begin to imagine.
Experts have warned us to brace ourselves for more mass graves as searches commence. They were right. As of this writing, four more sites have been uncovered, bringing the total count to 572. The Truth and Reconciliation commission estimates there could be as many as 4,100 children buried in unmarked graves.
Canada needs to find them all. And it needs to do it now.
Organizers of this weekend’s memorial walk told the Inuvik Drum it came out of a need to help Elders and survivors to cope with the emotions, memories and negative triggers. For descendants of colonists, these finds are a shocking new horror. Survivors of colonialism, however, are experiencing terrible memories over and over again every time one of these graves is discovered.
It’s disgraceful they had to live through the residential school system once. While non-survivors continue to wrap their heads what exactly truth and reconciliation means, these old wounds keep getting re-opened.
As a nation, Canada owes it to survivors to get through this chapter on the path to reconciliation as quickly as possible, so those who had to be there don’t have to return too many times. If we can locate the majority of these children quickly, we can minimize potential cases of post-traumatic stress disorder or other mental health problems.
This is imperative given we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. People already feeling isolated from lock-downs are even more susceptible to mental illness. The amount of pressure these discoveries are forcing on survivors is enormous.
The sooner they can put this behind them, the better off they will be. Ottawa should be taking a leading role and financing searches of every residential school that was in operation, including the ones that predate confederation.
Furthermore, once we can be sure we’ve found them all, they need to be given a proper funeral to allow their families the closure they have been so wrongfully denied. And efforts to keep their memory alive need to be national.
Every year, we wear poppies and hold a moment of silence in honour of those who died in combat for us. We do this, as the mantra goes, lest we forget. This is for a very good reason, as we implore younger generations to learn from the mistakes of older ones.
Indigenous peoples in Canada deserve the same. We need a day of mourning and learning to commemorate the fallen and celebrate the survivors. We need our children to learn about what happened at residential schools and make presentations to remind us of them.
Only then can we begin to claim we’re taking truth and reconciliation seriously.