Create Grave Sites to Identify the Victims of Residential Schools of Canada
Create Grave Sites to Identify the Victims of Residential Schools of Canada
Residential school survivor testimony has long been filled with stories of students digging graves for their classmates, of unmarked burials on school grounds, and of children who disappeared in suspicious circumstances. What is indisputable is that based on the government’s own records, generations of federal government officials and politicians knew that the subpar conditions in the schools were killing children and chose to do nothing.
Many now state that these children “only” died of tuberculosis, when in fact the many children did die of TB as well as epidemics of measles, influenza and other infectious diseases, but it is clear that these chronically and intentionally underfunded institutions actually caused the high death rates. There were overcrowded and dilapidated buildings with poor ventilation and insufficient heating as well as the woefully inadequate nutrition provided to students. “We cried to have something good to eat before we sleep. A lot of the times the food we had was rancid, full of maggots, stink.”
Malnutrition, of course, compromised children’s immune systems, making them more vulnerable to TB and other infectious diseases. This then led to taking the opportunity to conduct nutrition (or ‘malnutrition’) studies on thousands of these children. The per capita federal grant provided for food in most schools was often half that required to maintain a balanced diet. And the same was true for nearly every aspect of the residential school system, which, from its inception to the closure of the last school in 1997, was structurally underfunded.
Similar to common practice in residential schools, hospital and sanatoria administrators were lax in informing families about the conditions of a child’s death, where they were buried or, disturbingly, that the child patient had passed away at all. Many families still have no idea what happened to loved ones who left for these institutions and never returned.
The atrocities and horror will never be re-paid, but let us at least give these innocent children a proper gravesite with a gravestone for each child - we owe them this at the very least.
(Summarized from https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.scientificamerican.com/article/canadas-residential-schools-were-a-horror/%3famp=true