Canada names former TRC exec to help find answers at former residential schools

Editor’s note: Emotional support or assistance for those who are affected by the residential school system can call the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program hotline at 1-866-925-4419.

As Indigenous communities in Canada continue to search for answers with unmarked graves at former residential school sites, the federal government has now named an independent special interlocutor to work on the issue.

Kim Murray, the former executive director of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has been appointed to the role. Justice Minister David Lametti says she will work with families, communities, law enforcement, and the government “to ensure the respectful and culturally appropriate treatment of unmarked graves and burial sites.”

Murray says she will help work through the “conflicting jurisdictional quagmire mess” around the search for bodies.

“Indigenous families and communities have a right to know — and a need to know — which children died, how they died, and where the children are buried,” Murray said.

“Survivors have said that they want justice, and having these answers to these questions is part of the justice that they seek.”

The chiefs of the Cowessess First Nation and the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc, where hundreds of bodies have been discovered say this is vital work and applaud the appointment.

Cowessess Chief Cadmus Delorme says it’s an important job to help communities like his “fulfill justice, to get names to unmarked graves, and to validate the technical side.”

Related articles:

• Canada’s inaction on MMIWG calls to justice a ‘national shame’: NFSC

• Order of nuns that staffed B.C.’s residential schools to pass records to B.C. museum

• ‘They were concentration camps’: B.C. residential school vigil creator speaks on one year mark

Murray has a two-year year mandate that includes both an interim and final report. The federal government has budgeted $10 million for the work.