Cowessess First Nation plans search for unmarked graves

Within the next few months, members of the Cowessess First Nation along with people from Saskatchewan Polytechnic will be working together to find unmarked graves.

Cadmus Delorme, the chief of the First Nation located about 200 kilometres east of Regina, spoke with Gormley on Tuesday about what the project will mean for healing in his community.

“We hear the stories every year from the elders: ‘My brother’s buried somewhere over there. My mom is buried somewhere,’ ” Delorme said. “We want to stop saying ‘over there’ and start start saying ‘right here.’

“It’s a part of our healing and our truth. I can’t even give you a number of how many are unmarked, I can only give you the years, as from 1885 to 1967, two-thirds of what we call our community gravesite contains unmarked graves.”

The Marieval Indian Residential School operated in the Cowessess region from 1899 to 1997.

From 1898 to 1970, the graves were all looked after by the Roman Catholic residential school administration. It wasn’t until 1971 when the First Nation was able to look after the gravesite on its own.

“In 1966, the chief of the day, his name was Roger Stevenson, got in an argument with the priest at the time and the priest ordered his maintenance men to bury all the headstones,” Delorme claimed. “We have little dents in the ground. We have oral stories and that is what we are addressing.”

Delorme says this project has been planned for multiple years, and it was expected to get done sometime in 2020 but COVID-19 deterred the plans.

The recent discovery of the remains of 215 children at a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., only raised the importance of the project for Delorme and other members of the First Nation.

He says stories that have been passed down over the years from elders will play a large part in putting a name to where unmarked graves may lay.

“We then have a couple different maps from people who have gathered information from our elders to start to say, ‘Well, this is where this person is,’ ” he said. “Unfortunately, we’re not going to be able to name everyone but at least we could acknowledge that there is somebody there.”

The First Nation has received a grant from the Government of Canada to partner with Sask. Polytechnic to conduct the project.

There is no exact date as to when the search will start, but Delorme imagines it will be sometime within the next one to three months.

He described the end goal of the search being a monument built to commemorate people who are buried in the area.

“(We hope) to keep it clean (and) keep it safe so people can go there individually to do their mourning and their healing,” Delorme said. “This is a moment in time where we all are collective on focusing on the end goal.

“We all inherited this. Nobody today created residential schools, nobody today created the Indian Act, nobody today created the ’60s Scoop but we all inherited it and we just have to acknowledge that people are healing (and) people are hurting. Let’s do something about it.”