Moves are underway to preserve the neglected graveyard that was created for the Red Deer Industrial School, erected in 1893 at the river crossing near Fort Normandeau, directly west of Red Deer.
One of many residential schools funded by the Canadian government, the school was operated by the Methodist Church, amalgamated in 1925 into the United Church of Canada.
All that remains of the school, which held its last classes in 1919, is the small graveyard including four wooden headboards.
Archives records indicate that Red Deer Industrial School had one of the worst records in Canada for student mortality, naming Spanish flu among the culprits.
In a report to Indian Affairs in 1918, Principal Joseph Woodsworth said five students had died of the flu, including one boy who had run away and whose body was later recovered and returned to his home on the Saddle Lake Reserve, west of Saint Paul.
Staff were too weak to look after the burials, so care of those who died was given over to the undertaker in Red Deer, who buried them on Michener Hill.
On Wednesday, the last day of classes for schoolchildren across the country, descendants and relatives of the 325 First Nations and Métis children brought to the school joined community and church leaders at Fort Normandeau to honour those who had attended the school and set to rest the souls of those who died there.
Various speakers attending the prayers and feast made a commitment to look more deeply into the fate of children who never made it home from the school, including those who disappeared after running away, and to preserve the site where so many are buried.
The working group formed to host the celebrations is now committed to guiding the preservation project and has received a commitment from Justice Murray Sinclair, chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The three-member commission, including former MP Willie Littlechild of Wetaskiwin and journalist Marie Wilson of Yellowknife, was struck in 2008 to study the aftermath of the residential school system and recommend ways to assist its survivors and their descendants.
Learning the truth about those children who died or disappeared is an integral part of the commission’s role, Sinclair told the gathering on Wednesday.
Working group member Rick Lightning, whose grandfather and great uncles were among the students at the school, said his father had made secret journeys to the grave site to pray for a brother who never made it home.
The celebration on Wednesday is the first opportunity since the school was closed for family members to publicly honour the children who were taken from their homes and brought to the school, he said.
Now, it’s time to take that momentum forward and create a permanent memorial for the new generations of people whose forebears attended the school.
“I would like it to be remembered. I think we need to keep that memory alive.”
Sunnybrook United Church member Don Hepburn, also part of the working group, said the church had established a fund to help repay its debt to the families who were harmed.
Interest in the residential school started to develop about five years ago when an African visitor, upon being asked what the church could do for his community, pointed out that Sunnybrook’s congregation had neighbours that it didn’t even know, said Hepburn.
“We knew about the old cemetery, so we had a committee working about a year, trying to research it.”
While few people even knew it existed, questions about the graveyard’s future arose when a neighbouring landowner sought permission to subdivide some property, which would have opened the site to public access, said Hepburn.
The church intervened with the county’s development appeal board and an archeologist’s assessment was performed.
With that step completed, church members approached reserves from which the students had come and, last September, organized a meeting of about 40 people to decide on a course of action. The working group was formed from that meeting, supported in part by the church as well as a variety of government departments and First Nations agencies.
bkossowan@www.reddeeradvocate.com