Without doubt there was serious neglect and abuse that has been well documented, and in retrospect it was a cultural genocide, an attempt to rid Canada of the aboriginal culture. I was curious about how so many children could be buried at a single school and looked at this from a statistical angle.

Did you know that in 1900, in Canada almost a third of all children died before the age of five? Diseases like diphtheria and measles were rampant.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041751/canada-all-time-child-mortality-rate/

https://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/dmortality.htm

The The Kamloops Indian Residential School was in operation from 1890 to 1969, nearly eighty years. That would mean roughly 2.7 burials per year. The school had up to 500 in attendance, most were residential.

Given what I have read I’m surprised only 215 were found.

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/residential-schools

Malnutrition and poor healthcare meant that outbreaks of tuberculosis and influenza took large numbers of children who slept in close packed dormitories. Medical care was spotty since this was before Canada had a healthcare system. Doctors were expensive and these often remote schools were run on a shoestring.

The staff didn’t need to abuse and kill aboriginal children, the neglect is what filled the graveyard. The fact that when a child died they didn’t contact the family or ship them home because of the cost, they just added them to the burial lot. Whatever markers were used, (if they were used) rotted away or were burned in fires. When the schools closed they became overgrown and given most of them were in deliberately remote locations they were lost.

https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-graves-were-never-a-secret-why-so-many-residential-school-cemeteries-remain-unmarked

That there were thousands of lost children’s graves hasn’t ever been a secret. The act of breaking the links from these children to their families and culture meant that the families could never find them and adequately memorialize them. Government treated this as something to keep buried in the past so the effort to find and reclaim these graves was done on a local level, as in the case of Kamloops.

https://archive.org/details/reportonindiansc00bryc/page/18/mode/2up?q=dead

Even my own small effort with a tablet on my sunny back deck with the sound of children happily playing next door has brought me to realize that while we can do nothing for these broken children. We as a nation must do the right thing. These graveyards must be found and respect must be shown. This is for the families and peoples who were abused if not for the children who died. It is a first step to solving one of Canada’s greatest problems and that it seems is one of respect.

I can’t see how we can punish or who we can find accountable? The last remaining guardians who abused children are growing old and nearly gone. This is a movement decades too late for vengeance and with the exception of a few statues and place names there is nowhere to vent anger.

We don’t need knee jerk headlines that will be replaced (are already replaced) when something new and attention grabbing happens. We need the federal government to commit now to finding all the lost children.

I’m not aboriginal, I have no links to their community nor do I actually know anyone from an aboriginal background, but if my ancestors, even my close relatives were treated like this and then forgotten in this way, I know I would be angry and resentful of the culture that walked away from this institution. This is just my own personal effort to understand how this could happen.

And again, fix the damn drinking water.