How the finding of unmarked graves in Kamloops triggered a year of reckoning
Global News
The findings at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia led to the detection of hundreds more suspected graves across Canada.
Percy Casper, 73, spent 10 years as a child at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
He has spent the past year grieving.
A member of the Bonaparte Indian Band near Cache Creek, B.C., Casper said he was deeply distraught when he heard the news last May, when Kukpi7 Rosanne Casimir, Tk’emlups te Secwepemc Nation Chief, announced that a war graves expert using ground-penetrating radar had located 215 suspected unmarked graves at the site of the former school.
So, Casper grieved, for lost classmates, and for himself. His emotions twisted into a painful knot when Indigenous leaders later visited the Vatican to meet the Pope who represents the church that he says abused him.
But his spirits have been lifted by strangers, he said.
“Families have walked up to me and literally put their hands out and said they were ashamed of who they were on account of what we went through,” he said.
Casper’s emotional journey echoes a year of reckoning for Canada as it confronts the legacy of its residential school system for Indigenous children. The findings in an old apple orchard would reverberate from British Columbia’s Interior to Ottawa, the Vatican and beyond.
The discovery represented what Casimir called at the time, an “unthinkable loss.” The existence of unmarked graves had been a “knowing” among school survivors and elders, but the high-tech survey represented confirmation for Canada, she said.