By Elise Stolte
Vancouver Sun
June 28, 2010
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/thewest/Ceremony+honour+buried+aboriginal+children/3211906/story.html
Neglected graveyard near Red Deer recovered years after closure
Church officials and local aboriginal community leaders are planning the first large-scale, combined ceremony in Canada to honour children buried in a neglected residential school graveyard.
Wednesday morning’s ceremony, with a feast for up to 1,000 people, comes almost two weeks after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s first national event in Winnipeg, and it deals with one of the most contentious parts of the residential school story — the children who never came home.
Archeological evidence and school records suggest between 27 and 65 people, including five staff members, were buried on a small strip of land on the banks of a creek about a 10-minute walk from the former Red Deer Industrial School, just west of the City of Red Deer.
The school building has since been destroyed, and the cemetery itself disappeared from property records for years. But a private landowner preserved the site, along with four wooden headboards. In 2005, the local Sunnybrook United Church decided to try to heal relationships with local bands by researching what happened and honouring the dead.
“This is the first project, and I might even dare say it’s the first project of recovering a (residential school) cemetery with any church,” said Cecile Fausak, liaison minister for residential schools with the United Church of Canada. “We’re learning lots through the process and being looked at to advise other groups that might come together to do something similar.”
One smaller ceremony was held in Fort Providence, NWT, earlier this year.
Red Deer’s ceremony takes place Wednesday at 11 a.m. near the burial site. Organizers chose June 30 because it was the last day of school, when the children would traditionally be released.
The Red Deer Industrial School was built by the federal government and operated by the Methodist Church from 1893 until it closed in 1919. Children were supposed to split their time evenly between school and working in the fields, although former students later said work often took most of the time.
Especially during the early years, conditions were miserable at many schools. In the close confines of the live-in facilities, tuberculosis and other epidemics killed.
Red Deer Industrial was no exception, according to a 1993 University of Calgary study. The school reported problems with drainage from the boy’s bathroom contaminating the well, and federal records show a third of the 62 students admitted between 1893 and 1895 died at the school or within a decade of leaving it.
In a 1907 report, the federal chief medical officer said the school had the “worst mortality rate in the industrial schools examined across Canada.”
On Wednesday, members of local Cree bands, whose parents and grandparents studied at the school, will read off the names of 325 former students and sing an honour song.
The United Church, federal government and provincial governments are also sponsoring a traditional feast for the children, with a total budget of $32,000. Members of the Nakoda people from near Calgary are scheduled to hold a pipe ceremony at the burial site to honour their children, and Metis children will also be honoured in song.
Albert Lightning, a member of the Ermineskin First Nation near Hobbema, told his children their uncle was buried in that forgotten cemetery. He was 12 when he was called in from the field, arriving just in time to see the body of his six-year-old brother David being put in a grave. Then Albert was sent back to work.
“He didn’t even know his brother was sick until they threw him in the hole,” said Albert’s son Rick, now a grandfather himself and chair of the committee planning Wednesday’s ceremony. Albert died 19 years ago at the age of 104.
“He was really bitter about (his brother’s death),” Rick Lightning said. “Because David was so young, we didn’t know anything about him. My father never spoke much about him.”
But his father would have liked Wednesday’s ceremony, Rick said. Years ago, his father snuck onto the cemetery property, a grove of poplar trees on the edge of a small creek and prayed on his own for his brother.
Official records list David Lightning as buried in the city’s cemetery, not the small residential cemetery. But the records are so old and fragmented, “we don’t know who was buried there,” Rick Lightning said. “We’re doing it for all of the children, not just one individual child.”
The Cree believe they have a duty to pay respect to those who have died, but sometimes parents on the reserves didn’t know their children had died until months or years later, said Lightning.
The feast will finally help rest these spirits, he said. “We all need to belong, whether we are alive or we’ve passed on.
“(The children buried here) actually existed, they were human beings and they existed, and the families that come will be able to honour these children.”
Contact: estolte@thejournal.canwest.com
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