Survivors of Mohawk Institute Residential School in Ontario get $10.2M from Ottawa to look for unmarked graves
CBC
WARNING: This story contains distressing details.
The group overseeing the search for unmarked graves at the former Mohawk Institute Residential School in Brantford, Ont., is getting over $10 million from Ottawa, but says it isn't enough to help them do their work.
The federal funding to the Survivors' Secretariat at Six Nations of the Grand River will be disbursed over three years as the search is underway.
"We're obviously very pleased about the support that Canada has provided us," Kimberly Murray, executive lead for the secretariat, told CBC Hamilton on Monday.
"It's not going to be enough, and in fact, the budget we put forward was for more, but it's definitely helped us with the start of our search and the search for records as well."
The search began in November after Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation's preliminary search in Kamloops, B.C., last May detected 215 potential graves.
Mark Hill, elected chief of Six Nations, said in a joint-statement with the government that the funding is "an important step in the journey to bring our lost children home."
Marc Miller, minister of Crown-Indigenous relations, said people "deserve to find out the truth" and the government is "committed to supporting those efforts as they work toward healing and closure."
WATCH | Search begins in Brantford, Ont., at former residential school
Murray said the initial funding request was for over $8 million per year for three years.
"The search is quite expensive, the technology is expensive, the analysis of the data is expensive."
The survivors also want to create community archives for documents about the history of the school and the people who suffered in it.
The former Mohawk Institute opened in 1828 and closed in 1970, making it one of the oldest and longest-running residential schools in Canada.
Some 15,000 students from 20 First Nation communities were at the school. Many of them were abducted from their homes and abused there.
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