First Nations in Yukon hope search for unmarked graves of missing children can ‘bring peace’
Adeline Webber walks up a dirt road to where children once played from the former Chooutla Indian Residential School in Carcross, Yukon.
“I think about my brother,” she admits.
A brother she never met. Albert Jackson died in 1942, before she was born. His body could be buried here in an unmarked grave.
Webber says being on the site leads her to think about “how he would have walked around here before he got sick”.
During her research, she discovered that Albert died of dysentery at the age of five while going to Chooutla. Her mother knew nothing of his death until it was time for the children to return home that summer.
“He wasn’t with them and she never, you know, forgot that,” Webber said. “She always talked about him.”
In an effort to find out what happened to Albert and others, Webber helped create the Yukon Residential Schools Missing Children Project, a task force made up of two representatives from each of the area’s 14 First Nations. (Webber chaired the group until May 31, when she was appointed commissioner of the Yukon.)
The group met with people from all over the Yukon to find out if a search for unmarked graves was worth it. Last week, technicians with Burnaby, BC-based GeoScan began a survey of the site using ground-penetrating radar.
“It’s the people who told us to do something,” said Maria Benoit, Ḵaa Shaadé Hení, or Chief, of Carcross/Tagish First Nation.
“We feel positive and hopeful that this work will bring peace to our community.”
Chooutla 1 of 3 sites searched in Yukon
In 2021, a ground-penetrating radar survey discovered about 200 potential burial sites at a former residential school at Tk’emlups at Secwépemc First Nation in Kamloops, BC. It sparked similar investigations across Canada.
Judy Gingell, vice president of the Yukon Residential Schools Missing Children Project, says they have been working on this study since 2021.
“It really means a lot to me and I know it means a lot to a lot of people in the Yukon,” she said. “So it’s a real honor to be able to stand here today and say it’s finally happening.”
From 1911 to 1969, more than 800 students attended Chooutla Residential School. They were forced from all over the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and northern BC.
The building was demolished in 1993.
Peter Takacs, the GeoScan lead on this project, says ground penetrating radar (GPR) equipment and a magnetometer can typically survey about 2,500 square feet per day. GeoScan also deploys drones for heavily wooded areas.
“We could identify a location where there’s probably a grave or something like that,” Takacs said, but warned it won’t be known for weeks. First, the data collected from a number of locations around the former school, including an ice rink, must be analyzed.
“You don’t immediately see graves or unmarked graves,” Takacs said. “We’re seeing changes related to different physical properties of the soil.”
The first search for unmarked graves is underway on the grounds of a former residential school in Yukon. From 1911 to 1969, more than 800 children were forced to attend Chooutla Indian Residential School – and many never returned.
Three other former residential school sites in the Yukon will be searched at a later date.
Chooutla’s results are expected this fall. Gingell says she will meet with the lead before revealing results.
Cast a wide net
Tom Van Dewark of Know History, a research service based in Calgary, assisted the Yukon Residential Schools Missing Children Project. He says they cast a wide net to find information, including collecting statements from families of students who attended Chooutla residential school.
“We looked at national records, county records, territorial records, municipal records, church records — it could be anything that could be relevant to this, we brought it in and reviewed it.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission says it has identified 20 students missing from the school. But according to Van Dewark, the number is higher.
“We have already identified more than 60 deaths that occurred while students were attending school,” he said, adding that the number is likely to grow as the investigation progresses.
Harold Gatensby, 71, attended Chooutla Indian Residential School for a year as a child and lives close to the former site.
“People came from all over the north [to go to school here]. And they got hurt here,” he said with teary eyes.
Gatensby occasionally drives past the site while GPR work is being carried out. It gives him a multitude of feelings.
“When you see that, what they do on those grounds … it evokes the horrific,” he said.
But he is also relieved that the surveys are being done.
“Thank God. Finally! Thank you!” he said exuberantly, raising his arms in the air. “We’re doing something about this [history] that we’ve known since school was there. The people here know.”
Gatensby, who calls himself a “ceremonial man,” says he has been called countless times by people in nearby Choutla Subdivision to smear their homes. He performs a cultural ceremony in which sacred medicines such as tobacco are burned as a means of cleansing.
“Because ghosts of little children come into people’s houses at night,” he said. “Not horrifying, not like a nightmare. Like, ‘We’re here.‘”
‘They now have our attention’
Gatensby says he smears homes where people report lights mysteriously going on and off or something falling off a table when no one was in the room.
“[The missing children] wants to be recognized. But they are definitely being recognized now,” he said. “It took a long time, but they have our attention now.”
Ḵaa Shaadé Hení Maria Benoit says that spiritual activities of this nature have always been in the minds of the community members.
“We hear, you know, people have been fishing here and there’s a creek that flows down from Lake Choutla. And so sometimes people would go fishing and hear other kids playing in that area,” Benoit said. “They’ve been looking around for those kids, but they’ve never actually seen them.”
Webber says she has also heard stories of people hearing the missing children’s laughter.
“And they hear them and the kids sometimes play with them. The older ones say, ‘You know, they’re glad we’re here, [that] we’re looking for them.”
Including Albert Jackson.
“Hopefully he’s one of the kids running and playing right now,” Webber said.
