Unmarked Graves

This is a view of Quebec City from port Levis on the opposite bank of the St Lawrence river. It was about to rain and the sky over the St. Lawrence river looked rather ominous and unsettling. There was no immediate place to take shelter.

But that’s not the only story I want to tell. When we were in the Quebec City, the Pope was about to visit it. He was to arrive a couple of days after we would leave the city. Preparations were underway in the old Quebec City for his visit.

One of the main reasons for the Pope’s visit was to apologize to the indigenous community for the acts carried out against the indigenous community.

Since 1880s, the Canadian government was engaged in a program to take away children from their parents and put them in religious residency schools managed by the Catholic Church, against the full knowledge of the parents, let alone their wishes. The thinking was that the indigenous children would get the ‘right’ education for them to then assimilate in to the modern Canadian society.

McCord museum in Montreal has an exhibit on “Indigenous Voices of Today”, that talks about this topic. What I was not aware of and what was somehow very disturbing to me is that this episode was still taking place in my life time. The last of such schools closed in 1998.

Normally I like to take pictures of the exhibits in any museum I go. But at this exhibit, I just couldn’t. Individual stories described in those exhibits are not mentionable here. All I can say is that last year, archeologists found 200 unmarked graves at one of the residential schools.

No words, pictures or prayers can heal this darkness. The whole of humanity must bear its Cross.