Deninu Kųęųę First Nation in Fort Resolution, NWT, says that he has finally found the places where five children and two adults were buried, after years of looking for unmarked tombs linked to the old residential school of St. Joseph.
In a press release on Thursday afternoon, the first nation said the sites were located in Mission Island.
“Who are and the circumstances surrounding their deaths have not yet been determined,” the first nation wrote.
The elderly and the members of Deninu Kųęųę first nation know for a long time that there were unmarked tombs in the area. The first nation has spent several years looking for burial sites, a work that began in 2022 and was guided by the elderly as Angus Beaulieu, who suggested that Mission Island was a place where many people were buried before the school moved to Fort’s resolution and became completely operational in 1910. The school had originally been on Mission Island and from 1857 to 1890 in that location.
He said that the initial efforts to find burial sites were not successful, and the radar penetrating the ground did not reveal anything, but the elders insisted that Mission Island was the place to look. The research team of the first nation finally analyzed aerial photos and marked an area that seemed to be protected from felling and fire. They brought corpses, which located a site.
“After the excavation for the [Deninu Kųę́ First Nation] The archeology team, the burials have been found: “The first nation wrote, and added that the seven sites located so far are” only the beginning. “
Those involved in the search have estimated that there could be up to 60 unidentified burial sites linked to school. Residents have requested for years an investigation into how many unmarked graves there are.
Earlier this year, the head of the first nation of Deninu Kųęųę, Louis Balsillie, caught attention to the community’s efforts to exhum the unidentified remains of students of the cemetery of the former residential school, the efforts that the territorial government of interfering accused.
Balsillie and your Nedhé-Wiilideh Mla Richard Edjericon have also expressed the efforts of the community to return the remains of a child, Alma, who died while he was in the residential school in the 1940s, to his hometown.
In Thursday’s press release, Balsillie declared that he wants the territory to recognize that the burial sites maintain the remains of the children “that died due to adverse circumstances, that they died due to causes that would have been investigated if it had happened in a non -indigenous boarding school.”
