If you are an indigenous student in need of support during this time, please reach out to The Waterloo Indigenous Student Centre via email: wisc@uwaterloo.ca.
You can also contact Counselling Services (519-888-4567 ext. 32655), EmpowerMe (1-833-628-5589), or The Healing of The Seven Generations (519-570-9118).
The UWaterloo Anthropology Society extends heartfelt condolences to the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc people, First Nations communities, and the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation whose children were placed at these residential schools and further, to the indigenous community as a whole. While not shocked, we are profoundly saddened by the announcement of the discovery of the 215 children in Kamloops and 104 children in Brandon. We grieve the lost lives of these children and others not yet found. We hope that this serves as a wakeup call for settler Canadians and the governments to listen to Indigenous communities' oral and documented histories and to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action.
As we have come upon Indigenous History Month, it is immensely important that our society recognize the role that anthropology has played in the history of colonialism and genocide across Turtle Island. It is with the contributions of distinguished Indigenous Scholars that we have been able to lead the discipline toward its current position: a tool with which we can seek justice, accountability, and not only tolerance, but appreciation.
We echo the words of the Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, particularly the six points that related to these burials in the section Missing Children and Burial Information that we have shared below.
From CASCA (see full statement here):
"As anthropologists, we must continue to work for and with Indigenous communities with community-based oral historical and archival research that documents and confirms the injustices of settler colonialism. This includes a continued commitment to recognize our own history and entanglements with settler colonialism as a discipline and as individuals."
Missing Children and Burial Information: Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action
"71. We call upon all chief coroners and provincial vital statistics agencies that have not provided to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada their records on the deaths of Aboriginal children in the care of residential school authorities to make these documents available to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation.
72. We call upon the federal government to allocate sufficient resources to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to allow it to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
73. We call upon the federal government to work with churches, Aboriginal communities, and former residential school students to establish and maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries, including, where possible, plot maps showing the location of deceased residential school children.
74. We call upon the federal government to work with the churches and Aboriginal community leaders to inform the families of children who died at residential schools of the child’s burial location, and to respond to families’ wishes for appropriate commemoration ceremonies and markers, and reburial in home communities where requested.
75. We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried.
76. We call upon the parties engaged in the work of documenting, maintaining, commemorating, and protecting residential school cemeteries to adopt strategies in accordance with the following principles:
i.The Aboriginal community most affected shall lead the development of such strategies.
ii. Information shall be sought from residential school Survivors and other Knowledge Keepers in the development of such strategies.
iii. Aboriginal protocols shall be respected before any potentially invasive technical inspection and investigation of a cemetery site." (pg. 8-9)
With much love,
The UWaterloo Undergraduate Anthropology Student Society.
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