Feds appoint special interlocutor for unmarked graves tied to residential schools

WARNING: This story contains distressing details.

Justice Minister David Lametti announced Wednesday the appointment of a special interlocutor to co-ordinate the government's response to the unmarked graves that have been identified at a number of former residential school sites.

Lametti has tapped Kimberly Murray, a Mohawk woman originally from Kanehsatake in Quebec, to lead these efforts for the next two years.

Murray comes to the job with experience with this sort of work because, for the last year, she has been overseeing an investigation into deaths at the former Mohawk Institute Residential School near Brantford, Ont.

Murray has also served as Ontario's first-ever assistant deputy attorney general for Aboriginal justice. Before that, Murray served as the executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, where she worked to ensure the stories of survivors of the residential school system were heard and remembered.

As interlocutor, Murray's job will be to work with Indigenous communities to draw up some recommendations to strengthen federal laws and practices with regard to unmarked burial sites.

Murray will also engage with First Nations, Inuit and Métis governments, representative organizations, communities, survivors and families on issues like the identification of graves and the potential repatriation of remains.

The intention is to bolster efforts to protect and preserve these sites, which are thought to be the resting place of hundreds of Indigenous children who attended church- and state-run institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Murray said she was "honoured" and "humbled" to be appointed to this job, which will see her work with communities to "protect, locate, identify, repatriate and commemorate the children who died while being forced to attend Indian residential schools."

"I pledge to do this work using my heart and my mind in a way that honours the memories of the children who never made it home," she said.

WATCH | 190 radar anamolies found near Manitoba residential school site:

It's an issue that moved to the forefront of the national agenda last summer after the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation said preliminary findings from a radar survey of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School indicated as many as 215 children could be buried on the site.

In June 2021, the Cowessess First Nation in southern Saskatchewan also announced a preliminary finding of 751 unmarked graves near its former residential school.

Lametti said the identification of unmarked graves has "caused us all to reflect on Canada's history and the truth of this troubling past."