Delta Optimist December 30 2021

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Weather woes: B.C. had some major weather events in 2021, 5 Year in Review: A look back at some of the top stories 6-17 THURSDAY

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DECEMBER 30

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Canadian residential school graves forced the world to look. What has changed? STEFAN LABBÉ

Glacier Media

“Good fortune” is the way Ron Ignace describes his early years. As a young boy, his great-grandfather would show him how to burn grass and shrubs to heal the land around Deadman’s Creek Valley. “Then I got pulled off to residential school,” he said. “There’s only one in this area — that’s called Kamloops Indian Residential School.” May 4, 1962, is still burned into Ignace’s memory: the day he ran away. Ignace knew the school would come west to the Skeetchestn reserve to look for him. So, at 16 years old, he fled to an aunt’s house 80 kilometres to the north. He went to work in saw mills and on railways, ranches and apple orchards. “You name it,” he said, describing his tortuous path to Simon Fraser University, where he

studied Indigenous oral history. He eventually made it back to Skeetchestn, where he would serve as chief for 32 years until his retirement last spring. Thousands of other children, including one of Ignace’s aunts, never shared his fortune — their stories cut short, veiled in church records and in the memories of those who survived. That is, until a rib bone surfaced in an old apple orchard. Next came a tooth. The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Nation brought experts to uncover what time and earth had buried at the site of the old residential In June, a memorial was set up on the steps of Delta City Hall. school. On May 27, Kukpi7 ples,” Ignace told Glacier society in what the Truth 38,000 children were (Chief) Rosanne Casimir Media following the disand Reconciliation verbally, physically and told the world groundcovery. Commission (TCR) sexually abused, triggerpenetrating radar had From the 19th Century report has described as ing lifetimes of trauma. revealed the remains of to the 1970s, more than “cultural genocide.” According to the TCR 215 unmarked graves. 150,000 Indigenous chilChildren were report, at least 6,000 “I’m hoping that now dren aged six to 16 were removed from their Indigenous children are that people will believe forced to attend statefamilies, not allowed to thought to have died us when we say that there funded Christian schools speak their own language between the 1880s and was a policy of genocide designed to assimilate and forced to convert to 1996. against Indigenous peothem into Canadian Christianity. More than As experts

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in Kamloops hunted down more than 200 “anomalies” on the 160acre property, across Canada, other First Nations began to question whose lives were quietly snuffed out and buried on their own lands. CONTINUED: see P3

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