Search for unmarked graves begins at Sask. residential school

Toronto -

The search for answers has begun at Qu'Appelle Indian Industrial School.

On Monday, the Star Blanket Cree Nation in Saskatchewan commenced its search for unmarked graves at the former site of the residential school.

"It's a hard day, but we can get through it," said third-generation residential school survivor Renita Starr, who attended the school in in 1972, during a community roundtable on Monday.

More than 55 acres of land will be searched using ground-penetrating radar, a process that could take up to three years. This includes potentially searching the nearby lake and the other side of the valley that was once a monastery.

"We are hoping to find our relatives that didn't make it home and we believe that there will be some remains found," Star Blanket Cree Nation Chief Michael Starr told reporters on Monday.

"We want to take care of that in a good way."

Ground-penetrating radar was used to locate the remains of 215 First Nations children at Kamloops Indian Residential School last spring. Since then, searches at a handful of residential school locations have turned up more than 1,000 unmarked graves.

The Qu'Appelle Indian Industrial School, located on the Wa-pii-moos-toosis (White Calf) reserve 80 kilometres from Regina and just west of the village of Lebret, was one of the last residential schools to close.

Between 1884 and 1998, generations of Indigenous children from across the prairies were forced to attend the school, which was run by the Catholic Church for most of its history. The school went by several names, including Lebret, St. Paul's and Whitecalf, and was destroyed and rebuilt several times due to fire.

"Growing up, I spent close to 12 years at Qu'Appelle Indian Residential School. I've heard about runaways. I've heard many stories," Renita Starr said.

For survivor Lindsey Starr, the stories of abuse still haunt him. He remembers a fellow classmate telling him how he was taken by priests and put in an underground hidden "dungeon."

"They put me in this cell, dark, no light, and there was a little candle," he told CTV News.

All that remains of that dungeon today is a parking space where the ground has sunk in.

"They don't know what happened to our children. They don't know why they haven't returned home. There's all those question marks," Lindsey Starr said.

While finding the unmarked graves is one step, Bobby Cameron, chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, also wants to see the federal government charge those who are still alive and committed crimes in residential schools.

"If I was a 90 year old today, an Indian man and I killed a white boy several decades ago and it was just found out in the year 2021 that I committed this horrific crime, without question and swiftly, I'd be thrown into jail and I'd be put away for life," he told reporters.