Dear Editor:
I enjoy reading respectful opinions of other people; lively debate is the true spirit of free speech!
I feel I need to respond to the statement by a contributor about “5,000 Indigenous children’s remains buried without ceremony or markings of any kind”. This, unfortunately, is a common narrative. What evidence do you have for this opinion? None of us were there.
A hundred years ago people, including children, sadly died of diseases including the flu, especially Indigenous people who did not have the immune system for European diseases.
At a Christian residential school, regardless of what we think of their ethics, a child who died would have been mourned and given a Christian burial. This was the rule of the Church.
The child would have had a small wooden cross on the grave. Marble markers such as we would see today were not feasible, so no, there are no marked graves today. The little crosses would have disappeared long ago.
It is good that we are finding and recognizing these graves, and mourning the loss of the children. But I feel we would do well, in this instance and many others, to avoid the temptation to imagine the worst and assume that it is true.
Claudette Liske,
Mount Forest