Residential school ‘discoveries’: verdict by public opinion

The recent round of publicity about the residential schools has focussed on the presence of graves on the grounds of or near those schools. There have been questions raised about whether the objects identified by ground-penetrating radar actually contain bodies. If we suppose that these are indeed graves, what can we conclude regarding what happened in residential schools? 

Perhaps because we have been conditioned by advertising, we sometimes reach conclusions by word and image association rather than by logic. Graves are associated with death and death inspires horror. As a result many have concluded that the graves are evidence of something horrible that happened in the residential schools.

There have been many accusations of grievous offences by the staff of those schools. But whatever you conclude from other sources, the presence of graves should not be taken as evidence of wrongdoing. 

My reflections are not about the policy of establishing and operating the residential schools. The policy was mistaken and staff of the schools, often perhaps unknowingly, did great harm by following bad policy.

Nor am I writing about whether individual staff members were guilty of serious offences against the students. They were, particularly in the area of sexual offences.

But does the presence of graves in the vicinity of residential schools provide evidence that personnel in the schools knowingly and deliberately caused the death of the students who are buried in those graves? 

I will try not to impute motives, either of the people who established and set the rules for the schools, or those who staffed the schools, or those who are bringing the issue before the public today. It is all too easy to pontificate about why people acted the way they did, and if we do that we are as often as not mistaken. 

However, once the topic of residential schools arises in conversation people are only too ready to unload their opinions and their feelings in so many directions that the conversation loses focus and doesn’t lead in any useful direction. Maybe by limiting the topic we can move, step by step, toward reasonable conclusions. 

Numbers

The number of graves has shocked people. The assessment of the number of graves on the grounds of the residential school in Kamloops seems to be settled at about 215. The Kamloops school was one of the larger Aboriginal residential schools in Canada, and enrolment reached a high of about 500 students around 1950. 

In comparison, the number of graves given for the Marieval residential school in Saskatchewan is much higher – 751 according to a recent report. This number includes an unknown number of bodies of persons who were not students in the school. The graveyard existed before the school, is located outside of the school grounds, and should be considered a parish cemetery rather than a burial place only for the school. 

So while the Kamloops grave site probably contains graves of persons who were not students in the school, the number of students buried there was probably not much below the total of 215.

A number close to 215 is high enough to cause alarm. Why did so many students die at the school? Did they die of malnutrition? Or from abused? More than one person has even accused the staff of murder. Let us consider the number in its historical context. 

The Kamloops school operated for almost 90 years, from 1890 to 1978. Although present-day mortality of school-age youth is extremely low, that was not true during most of the history of the residential schools. In the case of tuberculosis, for example, the 1924 Canadian death rate from tuberculosis was about 84 per 100,000 people. 

By 1948 it was still about 46 per 100,000.

The Chief Public Health Officer’s Report on the State of Public Health in Canada in …. Said that from 1977 to 2011, the Canadian death rate from tuberculosis was lose to zero. However the Aboriginal population lacked the resistance that those of European origin had inherited regarding tuberculosis (as well as smallpox and to a varying extent some other infectious diseases). As a result, the Aboriginal death rate from tuberculosis and some other diseases remained higher than for the population as a whole.

The death rate in the 1930s and 1940s for Aboriginal people living on reserves was in excess of 700 per 100,000 people according to History of Public Health published by the Canadian Public Health Association in 2021. The lack of immunity was not the only cause of the higher rates for the Indigenous population; crowded living conditions on reserves was also a major factor. 

Widespread use of immunization, antibiotics, and better sanitation led to steep declines in the number of deaths from tuberculosis, pneumonia, polio, sepsis (blood poisoning), smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, influenza (other than covid19) and a number of other causes of death among young people. 

Today an average of two deaths a year at a school the size of the Kamloops school would surprise people, but it would not have been unusual during most of the history of that school. It would have been helpful if the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee had been able to compare the number of deaths in residential schools to the numbers for the public at large and for Aboriginal children living on reserves.

Location

Questions have also been raised as to why multiple burials took place at the school rather than having the remains returned to their homes. In the absence of documentary evidence, one can only speculate, but the practice at the time for transporting a body respectfully might involve bringing it to a train by a vehicle supplied by a funeral home, transporting it by rail to the railway station nearest to the family home, then having it picked up by a vehicle supplied by another funeral home and brought to the family residence or the place of funeral and burial.

When transport by rail was not practical, the body might be brought all the way by a funeral home vehicle. In any case, it would be costly, too costly for many families.

An added complication was that during most of the history of the schools only relatively primitive means of refrigeration were available. In the early years of the residential schools, transportation would likely be by horse and wagon or sled. The most likely reason deceased students were buried close to the school is that the government supplied no money for the more costly alternative. 

Unmarked graves

Most news reports about the graves include the information that they were “unmarked.” Presumably, this means that there were no crosses or headstones to indicate the location of the bodies. It is highly unlikely that there were ever stone markers for the graves. Wooden crosses would have deteriorated over time and been removed when they became eyesores.

One of my sisters died as an infant and was buried far from her Saskatchewan home in her grandparent’s burial plot in a parish cemetery in Nova Scotia. Many years later I was one of three family members who sought to visit our sister’s grave. It was unmarked and the attendant had some difficulty locating it. The reason given, which I have no reason to question, is that the wooden cross that originally marked the grave had deteriorated and had been discarded without being replaced. The absence of a marker, though disconcerting, does not prove conscious, willful negligence, and if there was negligence it was probably perpetrated by people long after the burial.

Occasionally Indigenous Canadians have objected to pipelines or other incursions across certain territories because these were burial places. The one such burial ground that I have observed had no markers, and it never crossed my mind that this indicated any carelessness or lack of respect by the Indigenous people for their buried members. 

Discovery

Reports about graves in or near the grounds of residential schools regularly state the graves were “discovered.” The word “discovered” can suggest different things. When I learn that Pope Leo XIII was born in the year 1810, I can be said to have discovered that fact, even though that fact is common knowledge. When the media state that graves were discovered on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school, people may take it to mean that the graves were deliberately hidden. However, I have seen no evidence that this was the case. 

My only intention is to defend the majority of teachers at residential schools from serious and unfair accusations. One of the accomplishments of our Western societies for which we should be especially grateful and proud is how we protect the innocent from false accusations. Libel laws protect us from false and defamatory publications. Our legal system provides elaborate safeguards for determining whether someone accused of a crime is actually guilty. When our system fails and the innocent are punished, perhaps because of inability to pay for a first-rate defence, we recognize it as a terrible injustice. Unfortunately, those who staffed residential schools have been subjected to a kind of trial by public opinion that has bypassed these standard protections.

Apart from ruining another’s reputation without valid evidence, which is in itself not a minor offence, the blackening of the reputations of the teachers at residential schools has been the prelude to demands for monetary compensation. Those who are expected to pay, mainly Catholic churchgoers, have no connection with the supposed crime other than belonging to the same Church as the supposed perpetrators. 

To those who feel so alarmed by the publicity surrounding the graves that they contemplate breaking their connection with the Catholic Church, to make such a life-altering decision based on an error would be tragic in the Shakespearean sense – a disaster resulting not from chance but from mistaken human choice.

Father Gallagher is a retired moral theologian. A version of this article appeared in Catholic Insight.