Canada's Criminal Undermining of Search for Evidence in Deaths of Children at Residential Schools
Amidst the events and commemorations marking the fourth National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, the Survivors Secretariat at Six Nations of the Grand River held a press conference on Parliament Hill. The Survivors Secretariat was established to recover and investigate the records of the former Mohawk Institute near Brantford, Ontario, to find the names of the Mohawk children who died at the school.
At the press conference they exposed Canada's plans to cut funding for the important work that they are doing. Since taking on the work to uncover the graves and names of the children who died on the grounds of the Mohawk Institute when it was operating between 1831 and 1970, the Survivors' Secretariat has expanded its work and established working relations with more than 60 other Indigenous communities across Canada whose children also died while attending residential schools.
The issue of the deaths and burials of Indigenous children in unmarked graves was sharply brought into the national consciousness in Canada after the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced in 2021 that preliminary findings from a radar survey of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in BC indicated that there were 215 unmarked graves on the school grounds.
At the time, the Trudeau government, under great pressure from Indigenous Peoples, Canadians and Quebeckers, pledged to fund the search for graves and children's remains there and on the grounds of other residential schools. In 2022, $209.8 million, a paltry amount, was allocated to support Indigenous communities who wanted to carry out their own investigations to "document, locate and memorialize" burial sites. That money has funded 146 such projects.
The Survivors' Secretariat points out that the most recent federal budget is offering $91 million over two years to continue research that the organization says is critical in getting to the truth of what happened to the children in these church-run institutions.
Laura Arndt, executive lead of the Survivors' Secretariat, speaking at the press conference noted that reduction of funds to the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund means that Indigenous communities are being "pitted against one another" and that the justifications are not acceptable. She also informed that the funding cuts were announced in a Zoom meeting in August where the Indigenous communities and organizations' mikes were muted and questions could only be posed through the chat function.
She pointed out that Indigenous communities are trying to uncover 150 years of history and that the money that has been provided in the last three years by Canada is woefully inadequate to do the work. She noted as well that the federal government is still withholding 23 million documents concerning the residential schools which they promised to hand over last year. She pointed out that to do a proper job to honour the victims will take many years and hundreds of millions of dollars.
Arndt said that Prime Minister Trudeau's claims to "support communities" and "be there every step of the way to honour the children who did not return" do not mean much if the work does not receive stable funding. She also added that there could be no reconciliation without the truth being acknowledged and that the undermining and underfunding of the important work being carried out to research and recover the graves of each child that died contributed to the "denialist" narrative that various individuals in official circles are taking up to say that the residential school system did not exist, that Indigenous Peoples are fabricating this whole sordid episode in Canada's history. She said:
"We say to the prime minister -- we've had enough. Promises only matter when you keep them, so keep your promise. Do it for the communities, do it for this country, so that they know what real reconciliation looks like."
"We shouldn't be held over a barrel in the national month of reconciliation, begging for funding for a promise that this prime minister made. Why should we have to beg for money from the very entities that conducted this atrocity?" she asked, adding that if the federal government undermines the work that needs to be done by cutting funds, the federal government will be part of the "denialist movement" aimed at whitewashing the crimes that were and are being committed by the Canadian state against Indigenous Peoples.
Also speaking to the media on Parliament Hill was Roberta Hill, a former student at the Mohawk Institute and a member of the Survivors' Secretariat who said that the school was "very horrific, very damaging, harmful and abusive," and that people like her deserve to know the true extent of the carnage caused by schools like it.
Research and investigations "are going to take time, and to cut funding now is just absolutely ridiculous, and it just makes me angry and very frustrated," she added.
What the Trudeau government is doing in the name of the Canadian people and reconciliation is unconscionable. It is criminal to pour salt in the wounds of the survivors of the racist and brutal residential school system and sully the memory of those who died. It must not pass.
(With files from CPAC, CBC)
This article was published in
October
3, 2024
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/ITN2024/Articles/TI54242.HTM
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