Canada’s unmarked graves: Interlocutor report seeks probe into missing indigenous children

Canada must establish an independent commission to probe the deaths and disappearances of Indigenous children from residential schools, a report released Tuesday said after hundreds of suspected burial sites were found in 2021.

The discoveries of the unmarked graves near the former boarding schools, which were set up more than a century ago to forcibly assimilate Indigenous peoples, shocked Canadians and led to an outpouring of grief and sympathy.

An estimated 150,000 children were sent to the schools between 1831 and 1996. Many of them did not return.

After the graves were discovered, Ottawa swiftly appointed a special interlocutor, Kimberly Murray, herself a member of the Mohawk community of Kanehsata:ke, to look into the devastating revelations.

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In her report Tuesday, Murray called for an Indigenous-led independent commission with a 20-year mandate to further investigate.

Murry told AFP that Canada has an “obligation” to support such a commission because it is the “perpetrator.”

She listed 42 obligations, like forced disappearances of Indigenous children be referred to the International Criminal Court.

Another item recommends criminalising rhetoric denying the abuses which took place at the schools – a phenomenon which has gained traction over the past year.

A bill tabled in Canada’s parliament would also criminalize downplaying the impacts of residential schools.

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The final report repeated intermediary findings that the government and church planned for children’s deaths at the schools, and that the deceased were sometimes buried by fellow students.

Murray said the federal government had adopted frameworks which allowed them to dodge responsibility.

Canadian Justice Minister Arif Virani called the report a milestone in the “ongoing efforts to address intergenerational trauma of residential schools.”

Indigenous elder Fred McGregor expressed his hope that the findings could provide healing to residential school survivors.

“We are the history here,” he said. “By what you hear in this report – we are in the shortfalls of the Canadian rule of law.”