The Chief of the Whispering Pines Clinton Indian Band says while the discovery of 215 unmarked graves of children at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School site doesn’t come as a surprise to survivors, but it does raise disturbing new questions.
Mike LeBourdais’ mother attended the school in the late 50’s and early 60’s – when it had become the largest in Canada’s residential school system. Speaking on the NL Noon Report, he says finding out that the stories of his parents, aunts, uncles, and elders are all true sickens him.
“A three year old…..were kids having kids is a question that was asked. And if kids were having kids – who was fathering them,” he said.
LeBourdais says the discovery is leading many to very dark places mentally, noting that assembling more stories from survivors like his mother is going to take time because of the trauma they experienced.
“It’s astonishing that a school has a graveyard,” he said, noting his mother recalls kids being loaded into cattle trucks when it was time to return home.
“And then the parents would be there, looking for their kids and there was no explanation to them. Where their kids had gone, what had happened to them. Oh they ran away – you know that kind of thing. Well, for 215 of them that wasn’t the case.”
He went on to say that it has been difficult for his mother to reconcile that it was the very people who professed to love them – who facilitated government policies created by wicked, evil men.
“The very people who professed to love you – the church, the nuns, the priests are the ones facilitating Canada’s kill the Indian in the child mandate at that time,” he said.
LeBourdais still calls Canada the greatest country in the world, but he also says it’s time to start acting like it.
Tscwinúcw-used to mean ‘Good Morning’
But come to mean ‘we survived the night’
By those that attended the #KIRS #residentailschools pic.twitter.com/WiPASppnYh
— T’Waax’man (@ChiefLeBourdais) May 28, 2021
Sitting with my mother and she is sharing which kids she knew that got sick or ‘went away’ and never came back
Tk’emlups confirms bodies of 215 children buried at former Kamloops Indian Residential School site | CFJC Today Kamloops https://t.co/EY1NagVj0N
— T’Waax’man (@ChiefLeBourdais) May 27, 2021