Search for graves at Yukon residential school site planned for this summer
CBC
WARNING: This story contains details some readers may find distressing.
The first ground search for unmarked graves at a former Yukon residential school will start this summer in Carcross.
At least 20 Indigenous children died at Chooutla Indian Residential School between 1911 and 1969, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
A working group that will lead the ground search there says that number could be as high as 42. Of those 42, preliminary research is unable to identify 13 of those children.
The school was run by the Anglican Church and demolished in 1993.
The Yukon Residential Schools Missing Children working group has been looking through archival documents and interviewing past students, trying to identify the children who died there, what communities they came from and where their graves might be located.
Adeline Webber chairs that group. She says the group has now hired B.C.-based company GeoScan to search for burial sites using ground-penetrating radar. Work is expected to begin when the snow is gone.
"We will finally get some answers to questions that we've had in our families; it'll help to bring some closure to some people," Webber told reporters at a news conference in Whitehorse Friday afternoon.
Maria Benoit, chief of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation, says she hopes locating and identifying these lost children will be the "final episode" of Chooutla school.
"I think it's going to give the community some rest," she said. "Hopefully … it'll bring some comfort to the people of the community."
James Allen attended Chooutla from 1954 to 1960. He says he wasn't able to have much of a childhood before he was taken from his family to Carcross. He described treatment from some of the supervisors there as "cruel." Students were rapped on the head with closed knuckles for misbehaving, he said, or forced to spend their Saturdays scrubbing rooms with a toothbrush.
"There was no nurturing, no love shown," he said. "Every night you'd hear somebody crying for their mother or their parents."
Allen said it took him years to recover from alcoholism that resulted from his experience at Chooutla.
He says he hopes the identities and communities of missing children are discovered and shared to bring closure to those still dealing with their time at the school, and the loss of community that came with it.
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