Warning: This article contains disturbing details. Reader discretion is advised.
It’s been a year since the announcement of the detection of unmarked graves at the site of what was once Canada’s largest residential school – an announcement that for many Indigenous survivors was confirmation of what they already knew.
A daylong memorial brought dozens to Kamloops, B.C., Monday to mark the anniversary as work continues at the site, and to honour the children who never made it home.
A sunrise ceremony was held on the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc powwow grounds, not far from the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.
It began with an opening prayer, and included an emotional speech from Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir.
“What scientific investigation confirmed were the truths about our survivors and what they’ve always known,” she said.
“Too many children did not make it home.”
The day to honour children who were taken from their homes and never made it back includes cultural performances, dances, drumming and speeches, and will close with an evening prayer, which will be attended by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau will be meeting with the community and will take part in a closed meeting with Casimir and members of her council, before participating in closing ceremonies scheduled to begin at around 7 p.m.
It’s been a year since members of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced the discovery of what it believes are the remains of up to 215 people buried at an unmarked area on the school grounds.
A file was open by the Tk’emlúps Rural RCMP last spring, and the case remains under investigation.
Casimir said it’s been a year of pain for some, describing the announcement made one year ago as “like a wound being reopened,” but that it’s also an opportunity for healing.
She said science will support the next steps, but that the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation is taking time, knowing the impact the investigation has on the community.
Casimir also noted the impact the discovery had on those outside the community, encouraging non-Indigenous people to want to learn more about Canada’s hidden history.
“The unmarked graves brought truth to the world, and the world stood with us in solidarity and unity,” she said.
Gov.-Gen. Mary Simon was at the sunrise ceremony, and said, simply, “You knew. You’ve known for so long.”
Addressing survivors and their relatives, she said that the investigation has been called a discovery, but it’s confirmation.
“You knew what happened here, the atrocities, the deaths, the loss. And the silence … And now everyone knows. It shouldn’t have taken this long, but finally, people know.”
Drummers play and sing during a ceremony to mark the one-year anniversary of the announcement of the detection of the remains of children at an unmarked burial site at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, in Kamloops, B.C., on Monday, May 23, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
(Ben Miljure / CTV News Vancouver)
DETAILS ON THE SEARCH
The search area was in part determined by the discoveries of a child’s rib bone and a youth’s tooth, and is the site of what was once an apple orchard, when the school was in operation.
Sarah Beaulieu, a professor at the University of the Fraser Valley and member of the search team, described what she found as “targets of interest” when outlining the technical side of the investigation last July.
While the only way to confirm what is in the graves is exhumation, according to experts behind the detection, the discovery matched stories from survivors of the school, some of whom described being woken up in the middle of the night to dig graves in the orchard.
Some of those children were as young as six.
Currently, the focus of the ongoing investigation in the Kamloops area is not excavation and forensic analysis but the search through ground-penetrating radar of the rest of the site, as only a small area of the grounds were examined in the initial study.
(Ben Miljure / CTV News Vancouver)
SURVIVORS’ STORIES
One of the people who attended the school as a child is Clayton Peters, who told The Canadian Press it was “the most horrible pain in the world to be a native, to be an Indian back then.”
He and his brothers attended the Kamloops school in the late 1960s, into the 1970s, and said he remembers thinking that the kids who suddenly disappeared were the lucky ones.
“I’d always thought that they ran away like I did, that they made it, that they were free,” he said, crying. Now he thinks some of those children’s remains may be among those hidden under the orchard.
Before he was kicked out at the age of 17, Peters said, he was regularly beaten and molested. Children who spoke their own language were made to eat soap, he said, and they were also forced to scrub their bodies with lye to “take the brown off them.”
When children fell ill, he said, they were put in a dark room rather than given treatment. The room was also used as punishment.
“I was sad all my life. When I left that school, I fought everybody. I fought every white man that bumped into me. I was so angry,” he said.
Another survivor is Ron Ignace, who told CTV News last year he’d been beaten for speaking his mother tongue, but that he refused to abandon the Secwepemctsin language entirely.
“I thought in Secwepemctsin and spoke in English, knowing full well that they could not beat me for what I thought,” he said in an interview on the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
He ran away during a leave on his 16th birthday, and said he’s living proof that the school system failed its goal, described by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as a campaign of cultural genocide.
And what happened back then had a lasting impact.
“This is a heavy truth. It has been referred to as a historic dark chapter but Indigenous people are very much alive with the repercussions that they’re living today,” Kukpi7 Casimir said back in July.
It’s important to remember that the Kamloops school is only one of 139 in the system.
Cutouts of orange T-shirts are hung on a fence outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, in Kamloops, B.C., on Thursday, July 15, 2021. (Darryl Dyck / THE CANADIAN PRESS)
DISCOVERIES ACROSS CANADA
Many spoke about deaths and disappearances of children who attended the school, and other residential schools in Canada.
The Kamloops discovery marked a year of further investigations at school grounds across the country, and calls for truth, acknowledgment and apologies from both the Canadian government and the Catholic Church, which operated many institutions in the residential school system.
The Pope issued an apology earlier this year, and is planning a trip to Canada in the summer that will involve visits to First Nations communities, though none in British Columbia.
Casimir included in her opening remarks a thank you to members of the church, including a local bishop who’s committed to working with Indigenous peoples towards reconciliation.
“We know that many of our people still practice Catholicism. We all need to have faith, we all need to have hope, we all pray to the one creator, the one god.”
With files from CTV News Vancouver’s Ben Miljure in Kamloops, B.C., and The Canadian Press
People are silhouetted as they walk past the former Kamloops Indian Residential School after gathering to honour the 215 children whose remains are believed to be buried near the facility, in Kamloops, B.C., on Monday, May 31, 2021. The year since the the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation announced that ground-penetrating radar had located the suspected grave sites in a former apple orchard has been one of national reckoning about residential schools in Canada. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
If you are a former residential school student in distress, or have been affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419, or the Indian Residential School Survivors Society toll free line at 1-800-721-0066.
Additional mental-health support and resources for Indigenous people are available here.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — A linebacker at Division II West Virginia State was fatally shot during what the university said Thursday is being investigated by police as a home invasion.
The body of Jyilek Zyiare Harrington, 21, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was found inside an apartment Wednesday night in Charleston, police Lt. Tony Hazelett said in a statement.
Hazelett said several gunshots were fired during a disturbance in a hallway and inside the apartment. The statement said Harrington had multiple gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police said they had no information on a possible suspect.
West Virginia State said counselors were available to students and faculty on campus.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with Jyilek’s family as they mourn the loss of this incredible young man,” West Virginia State President Ericke S. Cage said in a letter to students and faculty.
Harrington, a senior, had eight total tackles, including a sack, in a 27-24 win at Barton College last week.
“Jyilek truly embodied what it means to be a student-athlete and was a leader not only on campus but in the community,” West Virginia State Vice President of Intercollegiate Athletics Nate Burton said. “Jyilek was a young man that, during Christmas, would create a GoFundMe to help less fortunate families.”
Burton said donations to a fund established by the athletic department in Harrington’s memory will be distributed to an organization in Charlotte to continue his charity work.
West Virginia State’s home opener against Carson-Newman, originally scheduled for Thursday night, has been rescheduled to Friday, and a private vigil involving both teams was set for Thursday night. Harrington previously attended Carson-Newman, where he made seven tackles in six games last season. He began his college career at Division II Erskine College.
“Carson-Newman joins West Virginia State in mourning the untimely passing of former student-athlete Jyilek Harrington,” Carson-Newman Vice President of Athletics Matt Pope said in a statement. “The Harrington family and the Yellow Jackets’ campus community is in our prayers. News like this is sad to hear anytime, but today it feels worse with two teams who knew him coming together to play.”
DETROIT (AP) — Joe Schmidt, the Hall of Fame linebacker who helped the Detroit Lions win NFL championships in 1953 and 1957 and later coached the team, has died. He was 92.
The Lions said family informed the team Schmidt died Wednesday. A cause of death was not provided.
One of pro football’s first great middle linebackers, Schmidt played his entire NFL career with the Lions from 1953-65. An eight-time All-Pro, he was enshrined into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1973 and the college football version in 2000.
“Joe likes to say that at one point in his career, he was 6-3, but he had tackled so many fullbacks that it drove his neck into his shoulders and now he is 6-foot,” said the late Lions owner William Clay Ford, Schmidt’s presenter at his Hall of Fame induction in 1973. “At any rate, he was listed at 6-feet and as I say was marginal for that position. There are, however, qualities that certainly scouts or anybody who is drafting a ballplayer cannot measure.”
Born in Pittsburgh, Schmidt played college football in his hometown at Pitt, beginning his stint there as a fullback and guard before coach Len Casanova switched him to linebacker.
“Pitt provided me with the opportunity to do what I’ve wanted to do, and further myself through my athletic abilities,” Schmidt said. “Everything I have stemmed from that opportunity.”
Schmidt dealt with injuries throughout his college career and was drafted by the Lions in the seventh round in 1953. As defenses evolved in that era, Schmidt’s speed, savvy and tackling ability made him a valuable part of some of the franchise’s greatest teams.
Schmidt was elected to the Pro Bowl 10 straight years from 1955-64, and after his arrival, the Lions won the last two of their three NFL titles in the 1950s.
In a 1957 playoff game at San Francisco, the Lions trailed 27-7 in the third quarter before rallying to win 31-27. That was the NFL’s largest comeback in postseason history until Buffalo rallied from a 32-point deficit to beat Houston in 1993.
“We just decided to go after them, blitz them almost every down,” Schmidt recalled. “We had nothing to lose. When you’re up against it, you let both barrels fly.”
Schmidt became an assistant coach after wrapping up his career as a player. He was Detroit’s head coach from 1967-72, going 43-35-7.
Schmidt was part of the NFL’s All-Time Team revealed in 2019 to celebrate the league’s centennial season. Of course, he’d gone into the Hall of Fame 46 years earlier.
Not bad for an undersized seventh-round draft pick.
“It was a dream of mine to play football,” Schmidt told the Detroit Free Press in 2017. “I had so many people tell me that I was too small. That I couldn’t play. I had so many negative people say negative things about me … that it makes you feel good inside. I said, ‘OK, I’ll prove it to you.’”
VICTORIA – British Columbia’s Environment Assessment Office has fined Coastal GasLink Pipeline Ltd. $590,000 for “deficiencies” in the construction of its pipeline crossing the province.
The office says in a statement that 10 administrative penalties have been levied against the company for non-compliance with requirements of its environmental assessment certificate.
It says the fines come after problems with erosion and sediment control measures were identified by enforcement officers along the pipeline route across northern B.C. in April and May 2023.
The office says that the latest financial penalties reflect its escalation of enforcement due to repeated non-compliance of its requirements.
Four previous penalties have been issued for failing to control erosion and sediment valued at almost $800,000, while a fifth fine of $6,000 was handed out for providing false or misleading information.
The office says it prioritized its inspections along the 670-kilometre route by air and ground as a result of the continued concerns, leading to 59 warnings and 13 stop-work orders along the pipeline that has now been completed.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
