*Update! The OSI's mandate has been extended to Fall 2024. Expect her Final Report then.
Dear mum,
I recently wrapped up my work with the Office of the Special Interlocutor. For 18 months I had the honour of helping Kimberly Murray develop recommendations for a legal framework to support Indigenous-led searches, recoveries and ongoing care of the children who were disappeared by or who went missing because of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system. Much of what I did involved synthesizing research, untangling legislation and analyzing a century’s worth of bureaucratic obfuscation. But the heart of it was held in listening to those who survived the system’s slow genocide, those who remember the ones who were not returned, and those are diligently working, day by day, to find these children and bring them home.
Listening, respecting, supporting. It's the kind of work you taught me how to do.
So I’d like to return this gift. I’d like to respond to your questions in a good, honest way. Yes, it’s ok to ask: you’re not the only one who is confused, troubled, feeling torn between narratives and loyalties that are (apparently – and for some, intentionally) in conflict. I want to help you understand – just a bit - the truths of the taken children, even when the facts of their disappearances and deaths – how they happened, at whose hands, where they are buried – may never be known, and, sadly, may never be able to rest uncontested.
I offer this knowing that you do not expect simple, shallow answers. Nor must you demand authority from one whose role has only led him to the edges of their depths. We both know that these are not my truths to tell. But – as son, as public servant – I have a role in the responsibility of your questions. I know that you’re not asking them out of hatred. You are not among those whose racism, like some malodorous cologne, stenches the air of dialogue before it begins. You are no menial demagogue whose IRS denialism is just another front in an endless war against imagined enemies. The Special Interlocutor’s Final Report, to be released in June, will spend necessary time confronting such vitriol.
But yes, if your heart and ears are open, it’s ok to wonder. How could you not? When you have no chance to sit with folks directly, and when your chosen media deliberately amplify distortions, the truths of true stories become garbled, hard to hear. You understandably start to doubt the scale or scope of the system’s seven-generation crimes. When you read in your local Catholic newspaper that “no persuasive evidence has yet been offered by anyone for the existence of unmarked graves, missing children, murder or genocide in residential schools”, I’m not surprised to hear you asking, did these awful acts even happen?
So mum, let me start with that insidious quote, which takes a seed and says it’s a sequoia. A comparatively few news articles (6.5% of the 386 analyzed in this study) inaccurately reported that “mass graves” were found on the former grounds of the Kamloops and Marieval Indian Residential Schools in 2021 (the Nations themselves never made this claim). What was found at those locations is evidence of potential unmarked burials, evidence that these sites, these hollows on grounds of immense and documented subjugation, are the graves of missing children. You can read about the many hundreds of others that ground-penetrating radar has revealed across our country.
These are sites of Sacred significance to the Survivors, Indigenous families and communities who are searching for their relations. The work of how and when to take next steps with this evidence should – entirely – be theirs to lead. But I’m here to tell you, mum, these decisions are difficult, diverse and delicate in ways we cannot and must not pretend to predetermine. They are being made according to laws and knowledge that are not ours to assess, much less dictate.
To fertilize the seed of a few media misstatements into bushy claims of “universal… moral panic” is irresponsible at best. To state that there is “no persuasive evidence… [of] missing children” is willful blindness or an outright lie. And these claims cause further harm to those whom we’ve already - intentionally, systematically - hurt so much.
It is without question that over 4,000 of the children who were taken by the Indian Residential School system died in its clutches and were never returned home. Read their names here. The bodies, Spirits and burial sites of many more are still lost to their families. They may have died on or off the grounds of the “schools” they were abducted to. They may be somewhere in the archipelago of other institutions (Indian hospitals, reformatories, sanatoriums, orphanages etc.) that traded in Indigenous children over the course of the 160+ years the IRS system operated. They may have escaped alive but spent the rest of their lives – hours, days, years – unable to reconnect with their homes, with identities and kinships their “schooling” did its brutal best to obliterate. Yes, it’s ok to be unsettled.
Neither of us knows what it means to be subject to a system of genocidal design, of genocidal intent. Our relations – siblings, aunties, grandparents – were never disappeared by such a system. We have not had to spend our lives wondering where our loved ones went, when and how they died, where they might be buried. Our bodies, minds and souls have no experience of such traumas, so we cannot know the depths at which they cut.
But mum, our hearts, heads and ears are still being called to show up here. We still have important work to do. I obviously cannot tell you the stories behind all the names. But I can share a bit of one.
The Osborne family of Pimicikamak (Cross Lake) Cree Nation spent over 70 years searching for Nora, Isobel and Betsey. The three sisters were taken to different “schools”, then sent to different sanatoria, then buried in different cemeteries hundreds of kilometres from their home. Their parents never knew – were never told – where they were or what had happened to them, but they never stopped looking. Over the years, the search for three daughters became a search for three Aunties whom their relations never met, but never forgot. In 2019, more than 80 years after the three sisters had been taken away, the Osbornes finally cracked through a maze of hidden, missing and inaccurate records to draw close to where Nora, Isobel and Betsey were buried. The precise location of their graves is still uncertain: only one was ever marked with a name.
The Osbornes are just one among hundreds of families who’ve shared their stories with the OSI. You can find the fuller version of theirs – and many more – in the Independent Special Interlocutor’s Interim Report.
While the truths themselves are not and never ours, listening to families – as families – brings us closer to their felt realities. Our empathies naturally flow through veins of relation, naturally gather at a limb’s imagined severance. Most of us know this love in our bones. So mum, I offer this as one response, one way to listen.
I’m sorry for such a long letter – I’m sorry also for all I've learned but cannot say. But I do want to end by trying to express something even deeper, something that’s especially hard (but maybe not impossible) for non-Indigenous Canadians to realize. As the Osborne family told us – and as my work has let me glimpse – the impact of lost relations may be more profound within Indigenous societies, whose kinship roles stretch far beyond a single lifetime or family unit, than it is in ours. And just as profound as the losses are the laws that attend to these breaches: healing, restoring, calling lost ones home and calling those responsible to account.
One word in Anishinaabemowin offers a sense of this significance, this Sacred ache, this Sacred work: Aanikoobijiganag. It means one’s great-grandparents. It also means one’s great-grandchildren. Each person uttering this word is held square within the intimacy of seven generations. The ones who may have died long before you were born, who may be born long after you die – they are not faint or abstract etchings on a family tree. They act in the living world. They are guides and inspirations. They are recognized rights holders; they hold recognized roles within Indigenous legal orders. Thousands of them are missing because of the IRS system. They are asking to be heard, to be found, to be honoured and cared for – but perhaps not, let me suggest, to be brusquely disinterred for the leering enumeration of strangers.
Only Indigenous Peoples, upholding Indigenous laws, can bring their children home. The least we can do is draw down our dudgeon, lay off the hyperbolic presses, and let them. But – you, me, every Canadian – as people of love, whatever our faiths – we can do more. We can listen to, learn from and support Survivors, families and communities as they continue grieving, healing and responding - in their own good ways and in their own time - to these staggering, undeniable losses.
Look out for the Special Interlocutor's Final Report in late June. I promise it will help guide you through those questions you're asking.
Love always,
Simon
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