RED DEER—The red and yellow autumn leaves crunch under Lyle Keewatin Richards’ feet as he walks, sinking into the still snow on a small plot of private land on the outskirts of Red Deer. He treads carefully, for with every step he knows he may be walking on the grave of a child who attended the Red Deer Indian Industrial School.

The unmarked cemetery is located on a mostly empty stretch of farmer’s field, dotted with a few small shrubs and trees, next to a steep valley overlooking the Sylvan Creek. It’s about 500 metres away from the original site of the Red Deer Industrial School, established in 1892 and considered one of the most atrocious examples of the suffering, abuse and neglect that were rampant in Canada’s residential school system.

A 2008 geological survey found 20 burial sites in the field, but it is estimated between 50 and 70 children who attended the school between 1893 and 1918 are buried on the grounds. The Red Deer Industrial School was plagued by widespread disease, a defective sanitation system that led to further contamination and illness, underfunding, overcrowding and one of the highest mortality rates of any such school in Canada.

Richards stops to place a piece of tobacco on the ground, saying a prayer for the children in their final resting place. The only sign that this is more than just an empty field are two pairs of red and white prayer flags dangling from tree branches. Richards explains the flags went through a sweat lodge ceremony, and were prayed over by an Elder before being hung to honour the children.

Looking closer, one can observe slight depressions in the ground, marking the shallow graves.

“At this site there are little tiny graves,” Richards notes. “What the hell is that about? Some of the atrocities, I don’t even like to contemplate.”

As Richards walks, he recalls the time he welcomed a large group of students from various First Nations in Alberta to learn about the unmarked cemetery as part of a school field trip.

“I said I’m sure happy these kids are here, because they get to go home,” Richards said. “These kids never got to go home.”

Richards is an Indigenous advocate who has been working for more than 30 years to ensure that the children of the Red Deer Industrial School aren’t forgotten. He is part of Remembering the Children Society, a group composed of relatives of the children, representatives of the United Church, government officials and members of the public who are working to preserve the cemetery and share the tragic history and legacy of the Red Deer Industrial School.

In 2017, they unveiled a memorial stone at the current Red Deer city cemetery dedicated to four children who are buried there, after they died at the school in 1918 from the Spanish flu epidemic: Jane Baptiste, 13; Georgina House, 14; David Lightning, 14; and Sarah Soosay, 13. The group is now working to create something similar at the unmarked cemetery to memorialize the children buried there.

Richards, a ’60s Scoop survivor who draws his roots to Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan, does not have a direct connection to the Red Deer school. But it’s still deeply personal to him, because his own mother also attended residential school.

“It could just as easily be my mother here. And we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he said.

The Red Deer Industrial School was effectively a residential school by a different name, the main difference being that it emphasized manual labour, such as farming and household duties, as opposed to academic learning and religious prayer. The industrial schools were also located farther from the reserves. They were later phased out in favour of the residential school model.

About 350 children, mostly from Maskwacis, but also from communities such as Saddle Lake, Whitefish Lake and Nelson House in northern Manitoba, attended the school over the 26 years it was open.

In Uta Fox’s 1993 master’s thesis for the University of Calgary, entitled “The Failure of the Red Deer Industrial School,” she writes that when Peter Bryce, the chief medical officer for Indian Affairs, completed a report about diseases in residential and industrial schools in 1907, he noted that the Red Deer Industrial School had the highest mortality rate of all the industrial schools he examined.

The United Church of Canada’s residential school archive project documents how Bryce estimated that the mortality rate at the school was at least 25 per cent, but that didn’t account for the children who were sent home after showing signs of tuberculosis and other illnesses.

All in all, he estimated about 40 per cent of the children who attended the school died as a result of their time there.

One of those children was David Lightning, the uncle of Indigenous Elder Richard Lightning. David died on Nov. 16, 1918, after contracting the Spanish flu. At the time, nearly the entire staff of the school was sick, and principal Joseph F. Woodsworth wrote to Indian Affairs that they had no one to bury the children. So Lightning and three other children were buried at the current Red Deer city cemetery instead of the unmarked one that was next to the school.

“I thought the best thing to do was to have the undertaker from Red Deer take charge of and bury the bodies. This was done, and they now lie buried in Red Deer,” Woodsworth wrote on Nov. 25, 1918.

Death was a fact of life at the Red Deer Industrial School. According to the Red Deer & District Archives, the first death occurred the same year it opened, in 1893.

Of 122 students admitted between 1895 and 1903, 32 children (nearly 30 per cent of the total student population) died from tuberculosis, spinal meningitis and pneumonia following a measles epidemic. Between 1904 and 1907, seven out of 40 students died due to various causes, including six students between 1906 and 1907 — a particularly brutal year.

“As the story goes, when the influenza and tuberculosis and all that stuff was coming through, they were tasked to dig graves for their fellow students. In fact, they were burying them double,” Lightning, himself a residential school survivor, told Star Edmonton from his home of Ermineskin Cree Nation.

The prevalence of deadly disease at the Red Deer school is directly linked to a defective sanitation system that led to sewage contaminating the school’s well. Children often did not have access to clean water. A lack of proper sanitation and inspections, as well as severe overcrowding in the dormitories, allowed the diseases, especially tuberculosis, to spread widely.

There was also a major lack of proper nutrition and medication, Lightning said.

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“There was no prevention … no wonder tuberculosis was rampant,” he said. “There was no treatment at the time.”

Things improved for a while after an improved sanitation system was installed around 1907, resulting in the death of just one child between 1907 and 1913. But the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak hit the school hard, killing five students, including Lightning’s uncle, David.

Lightning’s father, Albert, also went to the Red Deer Industrial School. He didn’t speak much of his experience there. Lightning, who attended the Ermineskin Indian Residential School in Maskwacis, now understands why; he experienced extensive physical and emotional abuse at the school and believes his father did too.

“I never heard my dad say ‘Son I love you’, I never got a hug,” Lightning said. “I didn’t know why. But he went through the same trauma at the industrial school. Industrial, residential, same thing, different name.”

In 1987, Albert walked into the Red Deer museum and bumped into Richards, who was working there at the time. Albert told Richards he wanted his help finding out what happened to his brother, David, after he died.

That same year, Bartlett M. Moore entered the same museum with wooden grave markers he’d found in his field. Moore knew that his property was adjacent to a former residential school and understood the significance of the grave markers. The head stones were found on the site that is the current unmarked cemetery.

Richards doesn’t believe it was a coincidence that the man who went to the Red Deer Industrial School and the man who found evidence of the school’s unmarked cemetery would come into the same museum in the same year. His spiritual beliefs tell him it was meant to happen.

“And that was the start of the journey.”

Since then, Moore’s son, Doug Moore Jr., has presided over the property. He has worked closely with Remembering The Children Society and is a big supporter of preserving the site as an official provincial cemetery.

“I just feel it’s the least I can do,” Moore Jr. said. “Particularly knowing that it’s all children or mainly all children that are in there … I just feel that I can do my very small part in respecting it and lowering the grass there and kind of protecting it.”

Moore Jr. said he’s always been aware of the cemetery, but the Truth and Reconciliation Commission made him feel a greater responsibility to do something to acknowledge the horrors that occurred in the residential school system.

“We never really thought about it being a black mark on society,” he said. “It’s not until recent years through the Truth and Reconciliation (Commission) and so on that we’ve started to understand that it was as bad as it was.”

Now the society is working to install a memorial at the unmarked cemetery, similar to the one they put in the current Red Deer city cemetery, perhaps in the form of a cairn. They are planning a road allowance so the site is publicly accessible, along with a parking lot. They are also seeking Provincial Historic Resource designation for the cemetery.

For Lightning, marking the cemetery is crucial from a historical perspective, to acknowledge the atrocities that happened at the school.

“Mainstream (Canadians) don’t have a clue. That’s why this is so important,” he said.

But it’s also a way to free the spirits of the children, which have languished for too long in the unmarked cemetery, he added.

Standing outside the Ermineskin Elders’ Centre, just across the street from the site of the former Ermineskin Cree Nation residential school he himself attended, Lightning is speaking of intergenerational trauma and the continued impacts the legacy of the residential school system has on him, his family and his community.

The whir of a red and white helicopter flying above fills the air.

“It’s not an uncommon sight around here,” Lightning says as he looks up. “Drugs, gangs, suicides, we see all of it.

“That’s why in Edmonton, on Boyle Street, you’ll see a lot of the people who have been drawn to drinking and drugs. That’s part of the intergenerational trauma. Here, too, you go to Wetaskiwin, you’ll see them on the street … I know what they’re going through. We all hurt differently.”

From hurting to healing, Richards can relate. It’s why memorializing and honouring the children buried in the unmarked cemetery and recognizing the impacts of residential schools is such an important part of his life’s work.

“When I first started out here I didn’t think the residential schools had much to do with me,” Richards said.

“And the more we got into it and I’m talking to my mom … and you start talking about intergenerational trauma and what that looks like, what that looks like on my daughter — it’s really quite a journey. Because it leaves a scar. It’s a big scar. And we’re only starting to understand that.”

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