After searching for 70 years, Pimicikamak family finds graves of relatives taken to residential school

After 70 years of searching, a Cree family finally knows where three of their relatives were buried after they were taken from their first nation in northern Manitoba and forced to attend residential school.

In September, on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Betsy Oniske and her family gave her three late aunties a proper burial. Oniske, 67, carried dirt from where their final resting places — places across the province that were once unknown to her family — and put them in three tiny wooden boxes, each marked with a flower on top. 

At her grandmother's resting place in Pimicikamak, the family dug a small hole, just four feet by four feet wide and two feet deep. They lay the boxes in the hole and offered a prayer. In Oniske's mind, her aunts were returning home to their mother, where they belong. 

"My grandma would have been very, very, very happy," said Oniske. "My granny always talked about her three daughters who never made it back to their own community in Cross Lake.

"Their bodies never returned ... I didn't know what she was talking about until I got older." 

Oniske says she and her family spent 70 years looking for the burial sites of her three aunts: Betsey, Isobel and Nora Osborne, who were taken away to residential school in the 1930s. 

With the help of an archivist, she found their records — but not without roadblocks and reliving a painful history. To this day, Oniske is still trying to mark one of her aunt's graves an she says the family is far from getting the accountability they seek. 

Oniske said she was asked to find her aunts' graves 20 years ago by her grandmother, Sarah Jane Osborne, before she passed away — and in 2020, she succeeded. 

Her research revealed which cemeteries they were buried in, but not their precise location within the cemeteries. This year, Oniske went on a journey to visit each one of her aunties' gravesites to find out exactly where their bodies were laid to rest. Out of all three, only one — Nora's — was marked with a name. 

Through searching the Anglican Church archives, they discovered Isobel and Nora were buried in the Mapleton Cemetery of St. Clements Church in St. Andrews, Man. 

Oniske discovered Betsey was buried in the Riverside Catholic Cemetery in The Pas. 

When she visited The Pas, she asked the Our Lady of The Sacred Heart Cathedral to mark Betsey's grave. 

"The Father … They told us it was in row five, plot 13, and we said there's nothing there, no name," she said. 

"I said I need the Catholic Church to put a marker on my auntie's gravesite. So that's what they did, they put a marker on it," said Oniske. "They sent me a picture … I was happy with that."