Where are the children BURIED? . . .
Truth and Reconciliation Commission looking into most horrible chapter of
painful residential schools saga
By: Alexandra Paul
Posted: 02/19/2011
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/fyi/where-are-the-children-buried-116524718.html

No one knows how many children died in residential schools.
No one knows how many graves were dug for them.
And there is no peace without knowing.
Research at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is underway to get
a grip on
the approximate number of missing children and unmarked graves at residential
schools in Canada, including on the Prairies.
Justice Murray Sinclair, chairman of the three-member commission, said the
tragedy of the missing children is a chapter that casts a deep shadow on the
saga of residential schools.
That children died and went missing isn't in dispute.
It's part of the record and the memory, such as the story Joe Harper recounted
of how his friend Joseph died in obscurity at the Cross Lake
residential school.
Fifty years on, it still rankles him.
"There was never a funeral for him," Harper said outside one of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission tents set up to hear survivor accounts last June at
The Forks. "I don't even know how his parents ever found out."
One question likely to remain a mystery is how many Josephs were at the schools.
"We are, quite frankly, not going to be able to say how many children died in
the schools or say where they are all buried, and what happened to them after
they died," Sinclair said recently at the commission's downtown Winnipeg
offices.
Nevertheless, he said it's essential to tackle the issue as part of the
residential schools legacy.
To get the work done, the commission has hired Alex Maass, a former Indian
Affairs civil servant who is an anthropology expert on gravesites. This month,
Greg Younging, a professor of indigenous studies at the University of British
Columbia, was appointed assistant director of research. One of his jobs is to
oversee the Missing Children Project.
By the beginning of the 20th century, Canada's provincial governments were in
place, along with requirements for deaths to be reported as they occurred.
While residential school deaths may have been reported, there are few death
certificates attached to student files in old archives. Finding out what
happened to each child would involve matching church and government records to
Vital Statistics files.
"In order to properly document the children who died in the schools and where
they are located, you'd have to go through millions and millions of pages of
archival material," Sinclair said.
The commission isn't equipped to complete the herculean task.
Even then, there are too many gaps in the records to clear up every death and
every missing child.
The best the commission can do is try to identify the magnitude of the problem,
Sinclair said. "And once we have, there will be better information for a
decision to be made about what to do about it."
The commission hopes to have enough information to suggest further research and ways to commemorate the graves.
Survivors' accounts are part of the historical record and will be used in the research. Documents to corroborate those accounts are, not surprisingly, hard to find.
"We've heard stories from survivors that babies were born in the schools to mothers who'd been impregnated by teachers and by priests. They say their babies were taken away. They think their babies were killed," Sinclair said. "We don't know the extent to which that occurred, if at all."
Records show there was a practice followed when children died.
"The local principal of the school would make contact with the family and basically say, 'What do you want us to do with your child? He's dead. He drowned when he was running away or he died of disease.' Sometimes there was no effort made to contact the family. They just buried the child."
Depending on the era, there might be a few deaths per year or dozens.
John Milloy, author of National Crime, the most extensive book on Canadian residential schools, has said that reports dating back as far as 1907 show 24 to 42 per cent of children in some schools died of tuberculosis. He said nearly every school he knew of had a cemetery on the grounds.
Records cited in the commission's 2010 study on missing children contained very few references to those cemeteries.
With gaps and discrepancies like that, investigators have their work cut out for them.
"We need to be sensitive to the fact there is a great deal of misinformation and non-information out there," Sinclair said.
Google "residential schools" to get a glimpse of how the fate of missing children decades ago is a super-sensitive and sensational issue today.
Scores of sites pop up, referring to the Canadian Holocaust, in which 50,000 children died or disappeared. The figure is widely reported, but also considered likely a dramatic overstatement.
Many of the sites feature former United Church minister Kevin Arnett from British Columbia, the self-appointed crusader for families who lost children in residential schools. His contribution fuels a debate that's disturbing enough without potentially exaggerated claims.
Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice ordered a working group in 2008 to define the scope of the problem in the wake of Arnett's polarizing allegations and their impact on survivors.
The working group found that children had gone missing and graves were not uncommon. The issue was handed on to the commission.
"There are people out there able to take advantage of the mistrust between survivors and the government and maximize their fear and their anger," Sinclair said. "That means there can be no peace until there are some answers."
alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca

A city built on graves: Ancient aboriginal burial site largely forgotten as Orillia grew

Posted By COLIN MCKIM, SUN MEDIA

Posted 18 hours ago

Lying forgotten under seven city blocks is a vast burial ground where the bodies of men, women and children rested for centuries, each one buried in a sitting position, facing east toward the rising sun.

The graves, believed to contain the remains of Algonquin people, were discovered along Mount Slaven Creek between what is now O'Brien Street and Westmount Drive in the 1870s, when the area was still a wooded expanse outside the city limits.

Orillia judge J. Hugh Hammond wrote more than a century ago about digging up bodies and artifacts along the creek as a youngster.

"In the early seventies (1870s) as a schoolboy I spent the greater part of some Saturdays and holidays with my playmates in excavating Indian graves on the lots north of the extension of Mississaga Street, on Mount Slaven, near Orillia Town. Our schoolmaster (Samuel McIlvaine) urged us to make available collections of any objects such as beads, wampum and the like."

Hammond, whose account is quoted by historian Andrew Hunter in his 1903 study of 32 Indian villages in the Orillia area, gave a detailed description of the site.

"The graves were single and extended in long lines from the bank of the creek toward the hillside at the Coldwater Road, in a northwesterly direction. All of the bodies were buried in a sitting position, facing the east or morning sun."

The lines of graves were about six metres apart, said Hammond, who drew a map in a notebook, showing more than 100 Xs where graves had been found running in lines from Mississaga Street northwest across Mary and John streets. The map also indicates the locations of ashpits and notes the character of the soil.

Digging around the bodies, Hammond found bugle-shaped beads, arrowheads, spear points and wampum -- coin-shaped discs with holes drilled in the centre. In one grave, a black, bird-shaped amulet was found around the neck of a skeleton of a very large man.

"The lower jaw bone of this body was in place and I tried it over my own head and face and it passed clear of my face without touching it at any place."

French iron axes from the 1600s indicate the site was inhabited after Samuel de Champlain and French priests arrived in the area, beginning in 1615.

Copper kettles and knife blades and hatchets were also unearthed.

Hunter concluded the site, roughly 27 hectares in size, was an Algonquin settlement, probably used in the winter when the community migrated south from hunting grounds north of the Severn River.

The creek would have provided plentiful fresh water and the hill rising to the northwest protection from the wind.

Most of the 500 native settlements identified between Orillia and Midland are Huron, but the Algonquin territory to the north and east merged with the Huron lands in the Orillia area.

The Hurons grew crops such as corn and beans and tended to be more sedentary than the Algonquins.

Hurons typically placed their dead on scaffolds and later buried the bones following Feasts of the Dead in large pits called ossuaries.

Algonquins, a more nomadic people, were more likely to bury their dead in individual graves. Two bone pits were also uncovered on the site. The first was found in 1870 at the base of a pine tree and the other, containing 10 skeletons, was exposed in 1902 when a loton Mary Street was being levelled.

The combination of individual graves and bone pits could mean Hurons and Algonquins occupied the same site at different times or the burial customs were blending through the association of the two allied nations.

"There would have been cross-cultural influences," says John Raynor, an avocational a

While archeologists and historians are aware of the Mount Slaven site, it was largely forgotten as the city

Skulls dug up by crews laying a sewer on Mary Street in Orillia in the 1930s, displayed on a fence in the neighbourhood, are shown in the top photo from Orillia museum archives. The lower photo shows Lines of Xs on this map, drawn by hand in 1904 by amateur archeologist J. Hugh Hammond, show the location of bodies, believed to be Algonquin aboriginals.

grew out over the site, block by block.

There are no markers or plaques and the burial ground is not identified in the city's official plan or defined on municipal maps. In fact, none of 32 sites inhabited by the Huron and Algonquin in Orillia and the immediate area have been located on municipal maps or marked with historical plaques.

Since digging up graves and making off with the artifacts was common practice for decades through the latter part of the 1800s and early 1900s and no effort was made to preserve the integrity of each site, it's impossible to know how many burials escaped the predations of curiosity seekers.

What became of most of the pottery, pipes, jewelry, stone and metal weaponry, kettles, axe heads and other artifacts unearthed over the years is also unknown. There were no local museums and no one to place private collections into any kind of historical context.

Marcel Rousseau, a local history buff, wonders if the Mount Slaven site was the lost village of Contarea.

This native community somewhere near present-day Orillia repelled the Jesuits in the early 1600s, spurning Christianity as the work of the devil.

It was attacked by the Iroquois in 1641 and disappeared from the historical record, said Raynor.

Fraser Irvine, whose Mary Street home backs onto the creek, was astonished to learn the Algonquins had a settlement literally in his backyard and buried their dead where lawns and gardens now slope down to the water course.

"That's amazing. Just amazing," said Irvine, looking at Hammond's hand-drawn map from 1904. "I'm right smack dab in the middle of it. Nobody said anything about it."

In the four years he's lived beside the creek, Irvine has never dug down very far anywhere in the yard.

"I'd like to get a team in here and root around," he says. "That stuff fascinates me. You never know what you'd find."

The urge to satisfy curiosity is a double-edged sword, says Gloria Taylor, curator of the Orillia Museum of Art and History.

While the careful and respectful exploration of historic native settlements can yield valuable historical information, there is a risk sites can be ransacked by novelty seekers.

And often it has been the wish of First Nations that burial grounds be left undisturbed.

So the location of many archeological sites has been kept under wraps somewhat, said Taylor.

"The province didn't want places identified too closely for fear of grave-robbing."

But the protective secrecy can result in communities such as those in the old west ward of Orillia living in total ignorance of the history literally lying under their feet.

There needs to be better communication between the province where archeological finds are registered and municipalities where many of these sites are found, says Taylor.

Orillia Packet and Times

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