My family's survival of residential school inspired me to identify people buried in unmarked graves
To heal from intergenerational trauma, I reconnect with my ancestors
This First Person column is written by Shannon Cornelsen, who lives in Edmonton. For more information about First Person stories, see the FAQ. WARNING: This story contains details of experiences at residential schools.
In a field, between a suburban parcel of housing and Anthony Henday Drive in Edmonton, there is a graveyard. But there are no names on this site, and nothing to tell you who specifically is buried there.
One plaque, installed in 2000, explains that this is a burial site for the Enoch Cree Nation and that people "as far away as the Northwest Territories" were buried here, but it does not explain why.
When I come here, I pray for them and bring them a tobacco offering to let them know they are not forgotten.
It doesn't matter where they are from because they are part of my family, too. I'm from the Saddle Creek Nation and come from a family of survivors.
Wâhkôhtowin is a Cree word that means we are all related. It's why I have dedicated my work to finding out the identities of the people buried here and reconnecting them with their relatives. I hope that by giving light to their stories, we can start the healing process for them and all of our relatives, past, present and future.
The reason there are Indigenous people here from faraway communities is that this became a graveyard for the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton. The Camsell operated from 1944 to 1996 and was a segregated health facility known as an Indian hospital. There were approximately 33 of these segregated Indigenous hospitals across Canada, and the Canadian government is offering to settle lawsuits over the reported abuses against Indigenous patients there.
After many patients died during a tuberculosis outbreak in 1947, federal officials decided they wouldn't repatriate people's bodies anymore. Instead, some patients were buried at the nearest reserve rather than sent home. That's how some Indigenous people from the North ended up buried here in Enoch, while others may have been buried on the hospital land. Many of those families were never told what happened to their relatives who were sent away to a hospital and never came back.
I understand how terrible it must have been to see your children being dragged off and to never see them come home because it's a part of my family legacy. My great-grandmother was a survivor of the Duck Lake Resistance in 1885 in Saskatchewan. She was orphaned at a young age and sent to live with relatives in Saddle Lake, Alta, just outside Edmonton.
My mother spent approximately 10 years in the Blue Quills residential school near St. Paul, Alta. She is a survivor of residential schools, like her parents and siblings. The children would sleep in dorms in large shared areas, and she could hear when a child would cry and cry, night after night. If it went on for days, one night, it would suddenly stop. The next morning, she said the child would be gone.
When the children asked what happened, the staff would tell them the child had gone home. Those children were never seen from or heard from again, and they just became part of the stories of the children who went to residential school and never came back.
Those intergenerational traumas have followed our family for generations. I often reflect on what the terms "intergenerational" and "trauma" are doing in the same sentence. I want to lean on previous generations to create healing.
That's why I have started using the journals of my paternal grandfather, who recorded the deaths of Indigenous patients at the hospital between 1954 and 1963 as the Indian agent assigned to the area, and learning the oral histories from my mother, who had been both a licensed nurse for many years and later a patient at the Camsell.
It's also why I am researching who those patients buried in Enoch are and where they are from, so their families can finally have the closure of knowing where their loved ones are buried.
Understanding how systemic racism in our health-care system has denied Indigenous communities the human dignity that Canadians take for granted is part of my reason for this research.
I learned Cree in university, a language my mother was afraid to teach because she was physically beaten in residential school for speaking it. But she has given me other gifts passed down from generations. Like her, and our woman ancestors before her, I am stubborn — and I am determined to continue my work, though it has taken me years to get here and it is difficult. The responsibility I feel to reunite families and acknowledge their ancestors weighs on me, but the search for Indigenous people who have been disappeared by these institutions may never be complete. It's a daunting task.
Some months ago, I finally learned the name of a baby buried in the cemetery in Enoch, who was previously listed as unknown. It made me laugh — because my hard work had paid off to have finally found their identity — but I also wept because this should have never happened to our community in the first place. The same pattern happened so many times that my children would ask me: "Did you find another one, Mom?"
Doing this research brings up a lot of mixed emotions. But I know I am strong enough to do this.
I'm determined to move forward because it's about human dignity and finding closure.
We're just starting to scratch the surface of understanding residential schools and the children who were missing and disappeared through that system. The Indian hospitals are also part of that larger colonial system. There's a lot of shame that many Canadians still would rather forget that these things happened.
Education and healing will need to be practised together for any meaningful reconciliation. I will continue to educate myself and make good choices so that I can honour the prayers of my grandmothers.
A national 24-hour Indian Residential School Crisis Line is available at 1-866-925-4419 for emotional and crisis referral services for survivors and those affected.
Mental health counselling and crisis support are also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week through the Hope for Wellness hotline at 1-855-242-3310 or by online chat.
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