Category: Residential Schools

Orange Shirt Day

Orange Shirt Day

Murray, Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk, who is Canada’s independent special interlocutor for missing children and unmarked graves and burial sites, told ICT that she and her staff face an onslaught of hate from extremists who deny that First Nations and other Indigenous children were forced into residential schools to strip them of their culture, family and beliefs, and that many of them died there.

Orange Shirt Day: Canada faces rise in residential school denialism

Hate speech and confrontations are growing over the truth about missing children, graves and genocide

Bones of Crows

Bones of Crows

From the beginning, Metis-Dene writer-director Marie Clements had planned to shoot parts of her new film, Bones of Crows, at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. She established a relationship with the community to provide support to cast and crew members who belonged to that region. A week before the shoot, however, it was announced that 215 suspected unmarked graves were discovered on the site. “Obviously we’re a big machine, and as a production we’re thinking we’ll have to move and we better start on that right away,” Clements says in an interview. To her surprise, the organizers asked the team to continue with their plans. “They wanted the truth to be seen and heard.” “The blunt reality of it – that we’re working on a subject and we’re in the presence of it – it’s not in the past. It gave us a heightened consciousness,” Clements says. “We had to focus – for those families, for those babies that were found, and connecting our own families with that experience.

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Indian boarding school/Residential schools

Indian boarding school/Residential schools

One of War Bonnet’s earliest memories was the anguish of being separated from his family at just six years old. He’d been excited to go to school for the first time when his parents dropped him off at St. Francis in September of 1952. But that changed when he realized he wasn’t going back home.

‘Kids Were Marched Everywhere. This Was a Concentration Camp.’

Native survivors share stories of beatings, forced labor, sex abuse, and more as part of the federal Indian boarding school program from 1819 to 1969.

Opaskwayak First Nation Search

Opaskwayak First Nation Search

Those who were forced to attend the McKay or Guy Hill residential schools, or have knowledge based on relatives who went, will help map out which particular areas around the two sites to search — and how much land needs to be covered, he said.

Opaskwayak Cree Nation prepares to search 2 former residential school sites for unmarked graves | CBC News

Opaskwayak Cree Nation is taking the first steps to prepare to search two former residential school sites for unmarked graves, the First Nation’s leader says.

Indigenous Resistance

Indigenous Resistance

Ernest Knocks Off entered school at age 18 and attempted to run away soon after arriving. He ultimately went on a hunger strike and died of complications of diphtheria on Dec. 14, 1880.

How Native students fought back against abuse and assimilation at US boarding schools

Ernest Knocks Off was 18 when he arrived at the Carlisle boarding school in 1879. He was one of many young Native people who fought – in his case, to the death – to retain their language and culture.