Episode Details

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No longer ‘the disappeared’: Mourning the 215 children found in graves at Kamloops Indian Residential School

Content warning: This piece contains distressing details about Indian Residential Schools

A macabre part of Canada’s hidden history made headlines last week after ground-penetrating radar located the remains of 215 First Nations children in a mass unmarked grave on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Like 150,000 Indigenous children that were taken from their families and nations and placed in residential schools, the 215 bodies of children, some as young as three, located in Tk’emlúps were part of a larger colonial program to liquidate Indigenous nations of their histories, culture and foreclose on any future. To do this, Canada put into motion a system to “kill the Indian in the child.”

This system often killed the child.

While we currently have no evidence to determine the cause of death for each child, we know that they died a political death — these children were the disappeared.

Colonial population management projects

The chilling discovery in Tk’emlúps reminds us of the larger project of aggressive assimilation.

Indian Residential Schools were centres for state-directed violence against Indigenous nations, where the children — the heirs of Indigenous nations — were programmatically stripped of their Indianness.

Indigenous lives were broken down, sterilized of any trace of the gifts inherited from their parents and ancestors and re-packaged into Canadian bodies.

The brute nation-making scheme of the Canadian state looked to the existing infrastructure laid down by the prominent Christian churches. The churches were involved in population management almost from the moment of contact between European Crowns and Indigenous nations. The Catholic Church, which would go on to operate about 60 per cent of these schools, was a hawkish occupier.

Like branch plants in a vast production scheme, the state made good use of the extensive church network to co-ordinate the extraction of raw material—Indigenous children.

But the revelation of a mass disposal site for children — unrecorded and hidden — on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School tells us that the regulation of Indigenous life extended into death.

The politics of death and mourning