An Unmarked Grave

We are at the early stages of discovering how many unmarked graves are associated with native residential schools in Canada, but there will be thousands. And while some may try to argue that those who ran the schools “meant well”, there is no possible excuse for the anonymous burial of thousands of children, or the reported incineration of the newborn and the stillborn.

Those who can remember news cycles of more than a few months ago (aka “history”) will recall similar reports of unmarked graves of some eight hundred children at the ironically named Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, Ireland. Although nearly 800 death certificates were found, only two had burial certificates.

The children of Tuam were called bastards and the children of Kamloops were called savages, and those who survived were forever marked by the cruelty of their incarceration. Those who didn’t survive were buried without notation, without marking, and without ceremony. In the minds of those into whose hands they had been entrusted, they were, after all, just bastards and savages.

There is something morally bankrupt about dumping a body into the ground without respect and without memoriam. Treating human remains with indignity is a crime in most societies, but it takes a special kind of monster to dispose of a child as if they were putting out the garbage.

What is particularly egregious is that 60% of Canada’s residential schools were run by the Catholic Church, as was the Bon Secours home. The Church, happy to pontificate about the dignity of life and the evils of abortion, stumbles to mutter stilted and calculated apologies (if at all) about tossing babies and children into unmarked and quickly forgotten graves. Surely the born deserve as much dignity as the unborn.

An unmarked grave says that you died alone, without family or comforters. An unmarked grave says that you were deemed forgettable. An unmarked grave means that those into whose charge you had been committed didn’t have even a few minutes to fill out a form, put a small wooden cross over you, or mow the grass in the cemetery. “Dust to dust” takes on a harsh reality.

To be sure, unmarked graves are to be found outside Canada and Ireland. There are unmarked graves in the Katyn Forest, in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and in a thousand other places. The crematoriums of Dachau and Auschwitz are, frankly, of a kind.

We have not forgotten Dachau, Auschwitz, or Katin Forest, and we must not forget these unmarked graves on Canadian soil. They are, after all, of a kind.